The closest I’ve gotten was following the instructions from Matthew Pare on this Drupal post titled “Tips and Encoding Settings for Long Duration Screencasts“.

VIDEO

• Encoding: H.264
• Frame Rate: 10 fps
• Key Frame: 500
• Frame Reordering: Yes
• Data Rate Limit: No
• Encoding Mode: Multi-Pass
• Quality: Medium

AUDIO

• Encoding: AAC, 12 khz, Mono

SIZE

Here is the formula that he proposes, I will attach his actual notes below:

1. Start with the (original width) x (original height)
2. Pick a (desired width) (the height will adjust accordingly)
3. Divide the (desired width) / (original width) = (result1)
4. Now multiply the (original heigth) * (result1) = (desired height)

(you want to round the “desired height” to the closest even number)

MATTHEW PARE QUOTE

That explanation may be a bit confusing so let me give an example. I just have created a screen capture and my video has the dimensions of 1012 x 757. That’s way to big. My video is nearly two hours long, if I kept that size, my final video would be 250MB or even much larger than that. So I want to make this smaller, but still be able to read the text. I am going to say I want my final video to be as close to 800 x 600 as possible. As I have found that size still allows most text to be readable. So I am going to divide my desired output width of 800 by my source length of 1012.

800 / 1012 = .790513834

So now I need to determine the height for my final video. So I take the answer of the above equation multiply it by the height of my source video. So in my example I would multiply my source height of 757 by .79513834.

757 * .79513834 = 598.419

So I am just going to round this number off to 598.

My final video size will now be 800 x 598. Perfect!

So I’m looking into getting screencasting software so I can start building tech tutorials and how-tos, both for fun and growth. I’m also trying to think of real life things I’d like to post up (perhaps my cooking tests), but that will also require me to find some video recorder, my digital camera does video, but it lays out DV at 100mb/min (HORRIBLE rate). Although I have a 2gig card, so that is about 20 min(ish), still, I might want to find another recording source.