Linux Multimedia Hacks

Make a Screen-Capture Movie

Create animated screen-capture movies as the ultimate aid in a presentation or tutorial.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then how about a thousand pictures—or a graphical animation? Getting your message across depends a lot on the tools you have at hand, the environment you’ll be presenting to, and the audience. It’s one thing to stand in front of a classroom with a blackboard, a projector, and a room full of PCs, but it’s quite another to describe a set of ideas to multiple people standing in front of a kiosk, in a hall filled with competing noises and distractions. Wouldn’t it be great to create an animated presentation complete with screenshots and textual notes without first taking a course in multimedia and purchasing expensive development applications? Of course it would!

Let’s set the stage: the objective is to create a screen-shot movie that demonstrates how to use a feature in an application. In addition, you should be able to provide commentary within the movie to explain what’s going on.

Ideally, you can make a movie with tools that don’t take long to learn and use. The technique demonstrated here shows how to capture screenshots in rapid succession. These screenshots are then converted into a single file that can be read by nothing more complicated than a browser.

The Tools

For this hack you’ll need the following tools:

• The ImageMagick command-line utilities to create, edit, and convert images from one format to another

• xwininfo, the window ...