Non-Linear Editor for Text-Based Screencast
This addresses a specific need for creators of online educational content, particularly in programming, by enabling more flexible editing of screencasts.
The paper tackles the problem of editing text-based screencasts, which are difficult to modify due to tightly coupled sequences of text changes, by presenting a non-linear editing tool that allows users to substitute arbitrary parts while preserving consistency.
Screencasts, where computer screen is broadcast to a large audience on the web, are becoming popular as an online educational tool. Among various types of screencast content, popular are the contents that involve text editing, including computer programming. There are emerging platforms that support such text-based screencasts by recording every character insertion/deletion from the creator and reconstructing its playback on the viewer's screen. However, these platforms lack rich support for creating and editing the screencast itself, mainly due to the difficulty of manipulating recorded text changes; the changes are tightly coupled in sequence, thus modifying arbitrary part of the sequence is not trivial. We present a non-linear editing tool for text-based screencasts. With the proposed selective history rewrite process, our editor allows users to substitute an arbitrary part of a text-based screencast while preserving overall consistency of the rest of the text-based screencast.