Recently, Microsoft announced the release of Expression Studio 3. I was very excited about this because I noticed that my MSDN subscription included it whereas in the past all I had access to was Expression Blend and Expression Web. Kudos to Microsoft for making the whole of Expression Studio available to MSDN subscribers. I don't know if it applies to all subscription levels but whatever I have now includes it and its awesome!
The new parts for me are the Expression Screen Capture and Expression Encoder. I was heavily involved with streaming Windows Media Video years ago like 2003-2005 ish but the new Silverlight technology is so much nicer today. Anyway, the Expression Screen Capture tool is like Camtasia and Wink and other screen capture tools but its pretty darn easy to use and the Expression Encoder can encode the resulting screen capture into various formats, especially .wmv that is optimised for Silverlight, but also formats like mp4 suitable for upload to YouTube or Facebook etc.
I've found some issues with the audio getting out of sync with the video on YouTube but don't really know if its some fault of the mp4 file I upload or the conversion process to Flash that YouTube does. Some of the videos I uploaded to YouTube are better than others in this regard, but the Silverlight versions are consistently good.
There is even free hosting for some Silverlight files up to 1 GB total on http://silverlight.live.com/ and I'm serving my Silveright training videos from there. Expression Encoder can generate an html page to host the video and its easy enough to modify it to point to the video on the silverlight.live.com site.
So I spent the last 2 days doing some screen capture tutorials for mojoPortal using these new tools. For most of the files I uploaded alternatives on YouTube that don't require the Silverlight plugin, but as mentioned a few of them have audio video sync problems but not real bad. Best if you can watch them using Silverlight though and one of them, the Introduction to the mojoPortal Source Code is 20 minutes long so it was too long to upload to YouTube as they limit you to 10 minutes.
Here is a list of the video tutorials I made in the last 2 days:
I was long overdue to make some more video tutorials and having these nice new tools inspired me to spend a few days on it and it was kind of fun. Hope you find them useful and informative. Now back to regularly scheduled development ;-)