When I gave my lightning talk at CodeMash, I made sure to record it (with my iPhone's Voice Memos app). Then I trimmed the ends and converted to MP3 (with iTunes), thinking it was ready to Schmonzcast. But what about the slides? Turns out I had all the needed tools on Mac OS X to make a halfway decent video. Steps:

Acquire tools

  1. Have QuickTime Player (for A/V capture) and Soundflower (for audio redirection).

Configure the basics

  1. Plug into wall power to avoid “low battery” popups.
  2. In the Growl preference pane, set “hide all notifications”.
  3. In Notification Center, set “Do Not Disturb”.
  4. In f.lux, set “Disable for an hour”.
  5. Enable Caffeine.
  6. In the Sound preference pane, on the Sound Effects tab, drag the alert volume to 0.
  7. Also in the Sound preference pane, on the Output tab, set the output device to “Soundflower (2ch)” and maximize the output volume. All audio output will be sent to Soundflower, not speakers or headphones.
  8. In Soundflowerbed, send a copy of the “Soundflower (2ch)” stream to speakers or headphones.

Rehearse a few times

  1. Open the slides fullscreen. (Mine were formatted as S5 HTML, so I used Google Chrome in Presentation Mode.)
  2. In iTunes, make a playlist containing the audio track the slides will sync with.
  3. With the iPhone's Remote app, navigate to the playlist and start the audio track playing.
  4. Using the keyboard, advance the slides to match.

Perform for posterity

  1. In QuickTime Player, from the File menu, make a “New Screen Recording”. In the in-window settings popup, for Microphone, choose “Soundflower (2ch)”. Click the Record button and Start Recording.
  2. Go to the beginning of the slides, then do whatever it takes to hide the mouse cursor (I pressed an unimportant key).
  3. On the iPhone, start the audio track playing.
  4. It's showtime! Advance the slides to match.
  5. When the audio stops, wait a few seconds, then show the menu bar and click Stop Recording.
  6. In QuickTime Player, from the Edit menu, choose “Trim…” to slice off the prep work and dead air at the start and end. “Save As…” a “Movie”.
  7. Upload to YouTube or Vimeo, or apply ID3 tags (e.g., with iTunes) and podcast it.

This worked well enough for my one screencast, which had no live typing or narration. (Contrast with, for example, Destroy All Software.) Would it work as well for something more demanding? Maybe I'll find out.