One of the most effective digital teaching/learning tools is the screencast, which is essentially a video capturing the activity from a computer screen.  You see where the mouse moves and clicks, watch words being typed, and can listen to an audio narrative explaining what's happening.  For examples of screencast tutorials, you can check out the growing library in our Learn section.

Camtasia Studio is perhaps the most popular screencast creation application currently available for both Mac and PC, and does a fine job if you stick to screen captures and audio narratives.  The big sticking point with Camtasia comes when you try to integrate live video simultaneously with the screencast - after about 5 or 10 minutes, the audio and video signals start to drift out of sync, getting progressively worse the longer the video runs.  As of this writing, Camtasia Studio 6 still doesn't appear to correct this issue.

I've made it a standard practice to provide videos of all of my students' lessons, using my Acer Aspier One Netbook's webcam for quick and easy footage.  For some time, though, i had been hoping to integrate both video and screencasts together, where the student could watch me mark digital scores in real time as they played.  As typical piano lessons run at least an hour or more in length, Camtasia just doesn't cut it with its audio/video sync issues.  After scouring online tech support forums, i came across a nifty screencast utility made in the UK called BB Flashback Pro.  This appears to be the only screencast creation utility that I've been able to find that can effectively keep audio, video, and screencast footage all perfectly synchronized even with footage up to 90 minutes in length.

Working with the students at this year's Strings International Piano Studies program was the perfect testing ground to work out the kinks and find the optimal settings to run BB Flashback Pro, MusicReader, and my old Panasonic Camcorder set to Webcam mode on my HP laptop.  It turns out that to prevent memory bottlenecks, the screen resolution should be set to 640x480 pixels (BB Flashback Pro can set that automatically), and MusicReader set to half-page view in order for the notes to be legible in a smaller video window.  The webcam footage will take up half the screen, so the trick is to resize the MusicReader window to approximately half the screen size.  You half to be careful, though - too much window resizing will cause BB Flashback Pro to freeze up, requiring a hard reboot of your computer.

Here's an example of BB Flashback being used to capture video footage of a piano lesson together with a screencast of MusicReader being used to annotate the score as the student plays:

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BB Flashback Pro gives you the option to export your movies to Flash, Quicktime, and WMV file formats for optimal web viewing, in addition to AVI, Standalone EXE, and PowerPoint files with the movie embedded in the first slide.  Flash files are the most universal for web viewing (YouTube videos are all converted flash flv files), but unfortunately they tend to be pretty large.  WMV files seem to compress to the smallest sizes, but this Windows-based video format may not be as widely viewable on computers with different OS's.

You can add text boxes, buttons, and other graphic elements to your screencast movies, along with multiple audio tracks.  You can splice and edit down to the frame level for maximum control.

I'm really hoping BB Flashback Pro will add the option to move the webcam video beside the screencast window as opposed to its current picture-in-picture mode.  You can export the webcam video and the screencast as 2 separate files, but that kind of defeats the point of having them created simultaneously, and adds another hassle level to creating a finished clip, especially if you're working with a large number of files.

At $199, BB Flashback Pro isn't cheap, but then again not quite as expensive as Camtasia Studio which can run approximately $324 for a single license.  One more potential drawback is the fact that BB Flashback Pro currently only runs on Windows computers.  While not as slick as Camtasia Studio and lacking some bells and whistles, BB Flashback Pro is the only game in town that i know of when it comes to creating webcam, screencast, and audio content that stays synchronized for practical lengths of time.  I'm a little surprised that I haven't come across more reviews of this excellent program, even with its warts, as it really deserves much more attention and accolades for what it does well.