Gettin’ it done: Simple Instructional Video Creation on Linux

This is the first of a series of short how-to articles for Linux. None shall be overly dense or complex. As the title suggests, it will be about getting the job done simply and easily. Sometimes you go for the big-hack like challenge and others you need something like this.

In this story I will share a simple process for creating instructional videos on a fairly common Ubuntu-ish desktop. They needed to be easily played on a variety of platforms and the creation process itself should require little research or new skills to accomplish. Ultimately it should be easy to accomplish using standard hardware and Linux distribution. I needed to get it done and done quickly. It meets my criteria for such a task: it gets the job done. Once the prerequisites are set up, I can create a new how-to video for Linux in less than 5 minutes (less of course actual recording time).

It meets my criteria for such a task: it gets the job done. Once the prerequisites are set up, I can create a new how-to video for Linux in less than 5 minutes (less of course actual recording time).

As you may recall I am helping a friend come over to the darkside and as part of that process I have been making instructional videos for him. Each one is short (3-6 minutes in length) and demonstrates some common computing activity such as using Open Office or performing updates. Most recently Walter asked about using a CD label maker…he had attempted to install the Windows app he knew but to no avail, as you might guess. I was busy at the time so I shot him a few steps to follow to make it work; he got as far as installing it (yay apt) but could not launch it. This is where we join our story.

Before we begin though, one thing I would like to suggest is this: if you are supporting someone with a desktop significantly different than your own, I would highly suggest installing VirtualBox (sudo apt-get install virtualbox-ose or get the full version here), creating a virtual machine and installing the same version of Linux to that VM. Then when recording your video, tell the software to target the window of the running VM. This way all the user sees is something that at least marginally looks like what they have.

To get started you need to install a program called GTK RecordMyDesktop (sudo apt-get install gtk-recordmydesktop). You may want to install mencoder and ffmpeg if not already installed (sudo apt-get install ffmpeg mencoder). That is all.

GTK Record My Desktop

The task to be demonstrated here is how to use Kover Artist to create a CD cover; to prepare I grab a picture to use in this exercise and drop in on the VM into the Pictures directory. Then with the VM running I start GTK RecordMyDesktop, click Save As (poorly named button since you have to click Save As before you have anything to save), give it a meaningful name with a .OGG extension. If you are just recording your desktop you can now click Record; if you are targeting a specific window, click on Select Window (which yields a cross-hairs), click on your target window, then click Record.

You are now off to the races. Demonstrate the task at hand, keeping in mind that no audio is being recorded during this process. Still, there is some value is speaking any dialog you have so that it builds in periods of less visual activity and time to explain things.

When you are done, click the GTK RecordMyDesktop icon in your task bar (where it went to live while you were recording). The recording will stop and the encoding should commence. I have noticed that if you try to do too large of a recording RecordMyDesktop tends to go into la-la land and never come back. Another argument for brief lessons.

Now that your video is saved, you need to add some dialog to it. I do it like this. First plug in a headset or other microphone (internal mics can work but sound tinny), load up your video in a media player, then run the Sound Recorder app in Applications->Sound and Video->Sound Recorder. Select external mic for the input source and .WAV as the output type. Then click Record there and play on the video player and record your dialog. When done click stop and save it to a meaninful name with a .WAV extension.

We now have two files: an .ogg file that is the video and .wav file with our audio. You could leave this in the .ogg format and work with it from there but since I knew this might need to be played on a Windows box, I needed to convert it to something that Windows understands. To convert the video I wrote a tiny helper script called cvtmovie.sh:

#!/bin/bash

mencoder $1 -o $2 -oac mp3lame -ovc lavc

Thus running ./cvtmovie.sh rawvideo.ogg rawvideo.avi will transcode the media. Finally we need to add our soundtrack so I wrote the helper muxaudio.sh:

#!/bin/bash
INPUTVID=$1
INPUTWAV=$2
OUTPUTVID=$3

ffmpeg -i $INPUTVID -i $INPUTWAV -vcodec copy -acodec mp3 -map 0:0 -map 1:0 $OUTPUTVID

When called as

./muxaudio.sh rawvideo.avi mydialog.wav final_output_video.avi

Your video will be generated. Below is an example of the output. Yes, all dialog was ad-libbed

Kover Artist Demonstration

And that my friends is all there is to it. Sure you can see where you could go fancy on this but this column is called Gettin’ It Done, and so we have.

Peace,

JeffC