Creating Tutorials with Quicktime

Dear Reader, 

Before I continue, I will make a small disclaimer: The experience I am sharing in my posts is mainly my work with Apple Computer devices, as well as with software for Macs. But still, I hope you find it useful.

Before Jing (http://www.techsmith.com/jing.html) allowed uploading videos to YouTube, it would only generate .swf files. A format that YouTube doesn't accept. A fact I learned the hard way.

I was preparing small videos with tutorials for teachers so they would feel more comfortable when they would start using Edmodo (http://www.edmodo.com). I was going to need about 30 in total. (Remember, small chunks of information is better.) I was faced with the frustration of already having created half of the videos and worried about the other half I needed. Honestly, I didn’t want to redo them, it had been a lot of work and now I didn’t have time. I thought to myself, “There has to be a way!”. In my search for that option, I came across Quicktime.

I’m sure there were other ways, but this was a simple, quick, painless solution. I looked for online converters, but they didn’t really satisfy my needs. Well, turns out you can record with Quicktime! Just choose File -> New Screen Recording. To think that all this time I thought it was just a video player. It had been always right there in front of me. 

How did it work? Simple. What I did was play my .swf files one at a time, recorded them with Quicktime, then uploaded the .mov files to YouTube. Yes, I know, the quality suffered a bit, but I didn’t have time to redo them. After “recovering” the videos, I went ahead and created the new ones I needed. Piece of cake!

By the way, Quicktime also allows movie recording and audio recording. 

So there you have it, this is the story of how Quicktime saved the tech trainer’s day!

Cheers!