On my screencasts: I’m not at liberty to discuss the tool I use (you’ll hear soon enough). However, most people ask about the screencasts because of the clarity. Here’s the secret:
Capture your screen so you don’t have to compress the SWF. For example, this demo was captured at 960×600 and it’s locked into the player at 960×600.
Many people will do a full screen capture at 1024×768. Then they want to put it on the slide which is 720×540. So the SWF gets published down which causes degradation.
The next secret is to lock your player so that the image quality remains. Many people will allow the player to scale which causes degradation.
Tip: to do a full screen capture, bring your monitor resolution down (it will look fuzzy). Then when you’re done, bring the resolution back up and it will look crisp.
I am on a 30″ monitor with a 2560×1600 resolution, but I can bring it down to 960×600 and still get a decent full screen capture. That’s how I did all of the Articulate product tutorials.