Today, I uploaded a short screencast about Mindquarry to YouTube which will be included on our Web site.

I created it with iShowU and iMovie on my Mac and uploaded it to YouTube. It took some research on the Web as well as trial-and-error to achieve a good resolution in YouTube’s 320×240 video size. Here’s a short how-to:Download and install iShowU (I used 1.41), pay the $20. iMovie should already be installed on your Mac.These are my settings in iShowU:

• Audio: Turned off, because we later add music to the screencast within iMovie.
• Video:
  • Framerate: 15
  • Size: 100%
  • Quality: Max
  • Compression: Apple MPEG4 Compressor
  • Mouse: Record in each frame
  • Recording area: I used different ratios to show an overview or details. They all scale down well to the 320x240px size of YouTube videos:
    • 320×240
    • 427×320
    • 640×480
    • 854×640

Now start recording with iShowU.

Start a new iMovie project in MPEG-4 format (automatically sets the ratio to 640×320). Import the screencast files (File > Import), insert them, move them around, cut them, add images, audio, effects, etc.

When done go to File > Export in iMovie, choose QuickTime and from the drop-down that you want to define your own settings, click “Share”. Before saving the file, change the screen size by clicking on “Options”, there on “Size” and choose “320 x 240 QVGA”. For all other options, use the default settings (e.g. frame rate at 24).

The text effects in-between the screencast clips have been created in Keynote, which is part of iWorks. It’s a great presentation software with nice text animations. Keynote allows you to export to QuickTime movies which again can be imported to iMovie. The descriptive subtitles at the bottom of the screencast clips have been added within iMovie, just make sure you disable “Black background”.

Now I just need to find a good CC-licensed music for the screencast …

Useful resources:

• Making a Screencast with iShowU and iMovie
• How to produce a screencast in iMovie that doesn’t look like crap