Bob and Pat of Startup Success were kind enough to interview me last week on the subject of how and why you should make screencasts to demo your software product.  At first we reached out to the readers of the Business of Software forum to ask ‘Screencasts – what would you like to know?‘.

The Art and Science of Screencasts (mp3) is interview #21 at Startup Success, the mp3 runs for 42 minutes:

“In show #21 Bob and Pat interview Ian Ozsvald, founder of ProCasts on the art and science, mystery and drama of creating great screeencasts for your startup’s product or web site. Ian generously shares his expertise about how to target your screencast, techniques that make a huge difference, a range of free and non-free tools, ways to improve your video communication abilities and more. If you want to know how to create a screencasts that shines, this is the show for you!”

Become a better screencaster – read The Screencasting Handbook.  We’re distilling 4 years of experience into our book, the book will tell you everything you need to know to screencast faster, better and more efficiently.

Full transcript:

Patrick: Welcome to Startup Success with Bob Walsh and Patrick Foley.

In this, the 21st show, Bob and Patrick exchange tips and talk with Ian Ozsvald about the power of screencasting.

Bob: Patrick, how are you today?

Patrick: I’m doing all right. It’s more and more spring here. With everyday of nicer weather, I get a little bit more cheerful. How about you?

Bob: Same here. I kind of like the idea of sunlight and warmth. It’s a nice thing though; I’m working on my programmer tan, which means still pretty pale, white.

So tell me, what did you think of our interview with Ian?

Patrick: It was illuminating. I’ve been thinking that I and my team need to do more with screencasts, and I got some ideas from talking with him of which I need to look at and try to put into practice. But I think I was most excited about finding out that there are simply places you can practice that his Website, I believe was called ShowMeDo, is that correct?

Bob: Yes.

Patrick: ShowMeDo is a place that you can put some effort up there, and it doesn’t necessarily have to perfect, but the community will give you feedback on your work. I think trying something is better than talking about trying something, so that was a great thing for me to learn.

Bob: I guess what struck me, besides the fact he’s extremely knowledgeable and extremely well spoken on this, was this is a matter of video literacy if you will.

There was a time when the idea that we would be even having a podcast was beyond the scope of what people could manage to do on their computers, and now, it’s an everyday sort of thing. I see that video is heading in the same direction. And in the same way you decide whether you’re going to call somebody or email them, or Skype them for that matter, I think video is going to become more and more a part of a repertoire of how people communicate, especially online.

Patrick: I agree.

Bob: Especially for startups because, honestly, I’ve seen so many startup sites of late where the idea that they’re trying to communicate could be communicated in a 30-second video much more effectively than 500 or 600 words.

It’s a skill set and there are people like Ian, especially Ian, who can do it for you professionally, but you can suffice and to do a pretty good job yourself if you take the time to make it a routine. One of us are always thin.

Patrick: I think it’s worth picking out a certain area and focusing on it to build your chops. So for example, I don’t know why people would invest enormous amounts in help systems these days in written text for help, when it’s probably faster and easier, and more effective to record a Camtasia video and index a bunch of help videos instead of help text.

Bob: I think so too.

Patrick: You still need some help text, but I think for instructional tasks, videos are just easier to absorb.

Bob: Well, the acronym RTFM is really true, and no one has the time or attention bandwidth for that, which is why what Ian had to say with screencasts, I think, was excellent, and I think it’s something that our listeners are going to enjoy.

Patrick: Definitely. Well, let’s get right to it.

Bob: This week’s tip is a short one.

I think you should get out more. I think it’s time for you to get away from your computer, get away from the pud-base, and start spending some time with people that are of a like-minded nature that you are, in other words, more time with other entrepreneurs and software developers, and even startups.

Every professional knows that one of the things that they need to build, as they progress through life, is a network of other professionals they know. And this is extremely true in the software business. This is what’s kept Silicon Valley at the top of the pyramid for so long, and this is something that you should be doing.

The tool that I like the best for this, besides all of the things you can find online, is one particular site called Meetup.com. You may have heard of Meetup during the political campaigns of yesteryear, but it doesn’t mean that it away.

There are two Meetup groups that I think you’ll find interesting. The first is the entrepreneur Meetup group that has 283,000 plus members, and between these members in 37 countries and 786 cities, they’ve had almost 20,000 meetings.

Put in your location, your postal code or your zip code, and the odds are pretty good that somewhere within driving distance, there is an entrepreneurial Meetup group that you could visit. It won’t cost you much of anything except the opportunity to meet other people who might be just as interested in starting a company as you are.

The other group that you should take a look at is the software developers’ Meetup group. This is much smaller, but still, it’s spread out literally all over the world. Right now, they have got about 25,000 members and it had about 450 Meetups.

Again, meeting up with other people that are of a like interest to you, whether it’s through MeetUp.com or simply making yourself available for the events that people invite you to in the course of business, in this business, is a good idea, because you’ll never know what good things may come of being able to connect with other people who have the same interests as you do.

Today we have Ian Ozsvald who is the founder of Procast. Hi, Ian, how are you today?

Ian: Hi there Bob. I’m Very good, thanks. Hello to you too, Pat.

Patrick: Thank you. Hi Ian.

Bob: Well now that we got that out of the way, let’s get to the art and science, and mystery and drama of Screencasts, especially when it comes time to do screencasts for your startup’s product or your MicroISV’s product.

I put up this question at the businesses software forum and got a fair number of responses, people who were asking questions about the why and wherefore to do it.

Before we get into those questions, maybe the right question to ask to start with, Ian, is what’s the right way to go about doing a product or Website screencast?

Ian: Now, when you say “what’s the right way”, who you’re talking to, I guess, is one of the questions that ought to be asked at the beginning.

If you’re putting a screencast onto the front page of your Website, then probably, you’re aiming at first-time visitors who aren’t sure that your product meets their needs and may need convincing. So you’re going to want a short video, maybe 2 minutes in length, which tells the story to them about your product and shows it solving their problem, so they know they’ve got to stick around and learn more.

But maybe you want to have videos elsewhere in the site, in which case, perhaps it’s for a user who’s already convinced, they just need to see some more detail about your product.

So, it’s always the earlier question of who am I targeting and then what do I need to tell them.

Patrick: So I guess the first step is that who is it that’s going to be the target at that moment on that page.

Ian: Absolutely.

Patrick: And maybe the way to say is what’s the appropriate level of conversation. You don’t walk up to somebody and say, “Hi, I’m going to tell you my life story. You’re going to sit there for the next 30 minutes and enjoy it.”

Ian: Exactly, absolutely. I’ve certainly seen some sites where there’s a 30-minute introduction video on the front page, and that’s crazy. That’s far too long. As you said, that’s the life story conversation.

If I turn up to a Website and I’m not sure their product does what I want, but I’ve got a reasonable idea, I’ve come with a recommendation from some other site, all I want to see in a couple of minutes is that this thing does what I need and it’s worth me sticking around. I’m not wasting my time here. If you can tell me that in 2 minutes, then that’s all I need to know.

Bob: I’ve seen a lot of screencasts, and one thing I’ve seen, as a mistake – at least I think it’s mistaken, and I want to get you to tell me if I’m wrong or they’re right or what the thing is – sometimes, they’re just so slow. It’s like watching molasses pour out of a jar.

Ian: For sure.

Bob: And I think that the thing a lot of people don’t understand is that you’re doing video, and because you’re doing video, you should be using the techniques and methods of video, and probably the single most important idea there is the cut where you go from seeing one thing to seeing something else in non-contiguous way.

Ian: Absolutely. So one of the mistakes of a first-time screencaster is to walk carefully through their demo. They’ve prepared it and they’ve practiced it – the practice is important – and then they walk through the demo, going nice and slowly and carefully, and they give all the detail they can to tell all the appropriate points in the screencast. And the video runs for 5 or 10 minutes perhaps.

Then, they present that finished video on the web and they forget to edit away and cut it into scenes, as you say. Then we end up sitting there watching the webpage reloading, the hourglass spinning away, and then, perhaps they’ve forgotten their script, and they um and they er, then they remember and they repeat themselves. All of that, it’s fluff and it’s horrible, and it needs to be edited out.

But then the joy of some of the screencasting tools that are available now is that it’s so easy to edit those things out. It’s very easy for anyone, certainly in MicroISV, to sit back and cut down their raw material into a couple of short scenes, knit them together with a simple transition, and then make a perfect little, short screencast.

Bob: So they shouldn’t be afraid of showing “now we’re going to open this” and then just showing it open, than “okay, we get to watch and wait.”

Ian: I do it all the time.

Patrick: Okay.

Ian: I’ve noticed that if you cut out all of the hourglass segments, then there’s no context. It looks like something’s missing, because we’re always used to seeing the hourglass pop up.

But equally, if I’m doing a screencast for a client and I’m showing their web app, and it takes 5 or 10 seconds for their webpage to render, nobody wants to sit there for 10 seconds watching the JavaScript build on the screen. So, I just cut it so there’s half a second. The hourglass pops up, there’s clearly a transition of some sort, and then there it is. The webpage is finished and we can carry on.

Bob: So, one of the things you do is Rule 1, cut out the dead time and cut out the dead air, as the saying goes. Let me ask before we go much farther, just beyond the idea of preparing for the screencast. Should you prepare a word-by-word script like you’re doing a Hollywood movie or do you really not need to go that far?

Ian: Well again, it depends on who you’re talking to, I think. Certainly for all of the commercial work that I do, I always work with a word-by-word script, which I’ve arranged with the client beforehand, then I run past a copywriter, so that I know the script speaks exactly to the end user and it tells them the story they need to hear.

Now, in the previous startup I was running called ShowMeDo, which is an open source video tutorial site ñ it’s very large. It focuses on the needs of Python learners, people learning Inkscape and Open Office. In there, there are 100 authors in the site, and I’m the most prolific author, as one of these founders, but the others have all developed their own techniques. There we’ve discovered that trying to script an educational piece where you’re talking to your peers, there’s no point scripting down to the word-by-word level, because you’re each an expert in your own domain. You know what you’re going to be presenting.

We wrote storyboards so we have an idea of the scenes we’re going to go through in the video, and then typically, we all just record for 5 or 10 minutes live, typing away, showing what’s happening, telling the user “you click over here and now we’re going to do this. And now, you want to achieve this, so we click over here and we do this.” Then it all makes perfect sense, and it looks like a demo that you’re giving to a peer sitting next to you.

So that works very nicely in an educational context.

So, I’d say if you’re demoing the software to a converted user, they want to learn how to use your software, you haven’t got to go with a spit and polish, you can just go with a nice, comfortable, friendly demo with a couple of ums and er’s perhaps.

But if you’re doing a front page video where you’ve got 2 minutes, and the user who’s undecided, they need to know that you really care about convincing them, then at that point you really want a well-prepared script where you can rattle through, in 2 minutes or less, and tell them this thing does what they need, so they can decide to stick around or move on.

Patrick: Excellent. I, actually, am new to screencasting myself, and I’ve noticed it’s one of the things, the next one I do is always going to be better than the last one I did, because I’m finding new capabilities.

Ian: Absolutely.

Patrick: So that part you said about speeding up the boring bit, I’m mentally hitting myself on the forehead for the last couple of times that I didn’t do that. And part of that is I had never used Camtasia before, and I love it, but I’m learning how to use it.

Since you have a variety of experience, what tools do you like, and what are the pros and cons? Why might someone choose the tool like Camtasia versus another tool out there?

Ian: Predominantly, I’m a Windows screencaster and I love Camtasia. Prior to using Camtasia, because of ShowMeDo and its open source background, I shied away from Camtasia, because it costs close to £300 UK pounds, and I didn’t want my open-source authors to have to go and purchase any software, so I used open-source kits on Windows. That was CamStudio for recording and then VirtualDubMod for editing. Both tools are pretty decent, but they’re definitely unpolished open-source tools. They haven’t got great editing features at all.

When I discovered Camtasia, I completely fell in love. I could sit there, record a video, I could zoom in, I could apply labels, and I could transition between scenes. I could edit the audio; redo the audio very easily. It never lost synchronization, so that’s one headache taken away. And then, it could present the movie in whatever format I wanted at the end.

So, I would always say if anyone is serious about screencasting, once you’ve used any of the tools on Windows, go and buy Camtasia. It’s as simple as that. You will save so many hours. It’s just silly to waste your hours to save a few hundred pounds. You will burn so many hours.

Bob: Let me just interject one little Mac bit. Techsmith is now beta testing a version of Camtasia Studio for Mac. End of Mac bit.

Ian: And, they’re talking of the Mac. I also have a MacBook, and I’m a relatively new Mac user, but I’ve moved to the Mac for some of the screencasting, because some of the clients wanted Mac-based software recorded. So I’ve started to use ScreenFlow, and ScreenFlow is really impressive as well. It’s not as mature as Camtasia, but it has lots of extra, beautiful goodness. You can push the screens and do lovely fades, and make things flow around in weird ways. Also, the things that Camtasia can’t yet do, and I’ve requested those features and I guess they’re going to be coming along.

It’ll be nice to see Camtasia on the Mac, so there will be a nice little war between those two, and we should get some really nice tools in the next year I think.

Patrick: Competition is good. I agree.

Ian: Absolutely. And Pat, I’ve got some more tools if you’d like me to expand up on that.

Patrick: Sure. Can you give an idea particularly for a startup who isn’t willing to invest money, you mentioned some open source. Can you give us some ideas of open source and lower-cost tools at least worth looking at for a MicroISV starting up who’s not able to invest? And then we’ll put the links on our Website.

Ian: Absolutely. Well, if you’re a MicroISV and you to get your feet wet without spending any money, then go for CamStudio. That’s the open source screencasting tool. It comes with a free lossless codec, so you get perfect recordings. The problem with CamStudio is that when you’re recording audio live, you can end up with the audio and video desynchronizing, and then you have to go and knit it back together.

And you can use VirtualDubMod, which is an open-source video editor package to tie those two back together. VirtualDubMod, it’s a perfectly fine bit of editing software that’s about 10 years old; it’s just very clunky. But if you want to cut scenes out and export the video in different formats, it does the job, and again, it’s open-source and free.

There are some extra tools. I use MZoom. That records where your mouse is on the screen, so if you have a paused and then do something else and then come back, MZoom tells you exactly where your mouse was and where it now is so you can realign it back on the screen to carry on after a pause.

I use FFmpeg, which is the open-source video converter tool that’ll convert any formats. That’s command line only, but very powerful. There’s loads of help online.

Sizer on Windows is fabulous. With Sizer, you right-click when you want to resize a window, and you can define preset sizes, so you can set your window up to be at a certain place and a certain size on the screen. That way, all of your recordings are consistent every time.

I’ve also used Subtitle Workshop. That’s an open-source subtitle tool. I think it lets you hardcode subtitles. It certainly generates external subtitles that you can use.

And Audacity, I love Audacity for editing audio. I do all of my audio recording in Audacity, and then I splice it using Camtasia afterwards. And that way, I get noiseless, perfect audio recordings.

Patrick: I really like Audacity as well, by the way.

Ian: It’s fabulous.

Patrick: Yes. Again, it’s amazing that that’s free. The quality, it’s perfect for editing a podcast.

Ian: Absolutely.

Patrick: It’s just a very nice tool.

Speaking of sound, there was a question on the Joel on Software discussion that I think is good to start here. For a starter, for a beginner who is learning how to do podcasts, and let’s assume that they’re using Camtasia. Camtasia also has a pretty decent 30-day trial, so you want to find out if it’s something you’re going to keep going with, that’s another route your can take.

Do you recommend doing the audio separate from the demo or kind of fumbling through a live audio track while you do the demo? For a beginner, do you recommend doing the screencasting and overdubbing it later or try to do them both? What do you think a beginner should do there?

Ian: For a perfect result, I would always say do the audio separately, but that’s quite time-intensive, obviously. If you are a beginner and you are learning, and you’ve got a script that is 1 or 2 minutes long, and you know your product so you now has to present it, you should do just fine doing a couple of takes where you start right at the beginning.

You work through your script, you’re talking as you move the mouse and you click around, you get to the end, and you play it back. If it was great, then fine, you’ve got a wonderful take. If there was an error, you can retake it. Each take only takes 2 minutes, so there’s no harm doing a couple of them. Then at the end of that, you’ve probably got a pretty good take. You’ve made a bunch of takes from start to finish in a space of 30 minutes.

Bob: Well, when you’re working through this, one of the things you mentioned was the idea of doing a storyboard, and I was curious. What do you use to do your storyboards and how do you do that?

Ian: Good old-fashioned pen and paper. You can’t beat pen and paper.

Bob: Pen and paper.

Bob: Okay. Is that an iPhone app now?

Ian: No, I just regressed 10 years for that.

So when I’m planning educational material in ShowMeDo, generally I just sketch out just using words on paper what I’ll be covering. Mostly, I teach python programming and I’m a veteran programmer, and a 5-year python programmer.

So, once I know what I want to demonstrate in a 5-minute tutorial video, I can just sit there and rattle a story. I record the audio live, I take the very simple approach, and then every 10 minutes, I’ve got a new finished 5-minute tutorial, which I can package up and send down, so it’s great. So, I spend hours preparing and practicing, and then just do a few live takes, and I’ve got a finished video.

With the Procasting work, if I’m doing work for a client, it has to be absolutely perfect, and I got to pains over this. So there, I work often with my partner and animator, Richard, and we’ll sketch out some paper any graphical elements to the scenes, and we’ll write out next to them the text elements of the scenes, and we’ll break a several-minute video down into several pages, pulling apart each of the scenes. Then we’ll agree upon that. It’s obvious what’s going on. We can do a prototype video and agree it with the client, and then I can record the video elements. Richard can work on any animated elements, then I can do an audio element. Afterwards, we tie it all together and then present the finished thing. But that’s obviously quite involved. That takes a good few days.

Bob: For people who want to do this on their own and do it in sort of a repeatable fashion, any suggestions about how you treat video and audio as reusable assets?

Ian: I was pondering that question earlier. Now, I’ve never done that. The reason is that I found that if you’re demonstrating something, normally, the audio and the video are unique to that demonstration. You could have a video segment, which you’re going to use in several places with, I’ll call it a generic voice-over, but one that’s applicable to both. That’s possible, but I’ve never ever done that.

For me, it’s always about distilling the shortest possible message for the end user. I’ll give you an example.

Recently, we launched an advocacy piece for the AdBlock plug-in in Firefox, so on the front of AdBlockPlus.org, there’s a video that we made running for 2 minutes. It’s been played 7,000 times in the last 2 weeks. That’s about 10 day’s continuous viewing time. It was worth us spending a couple of days getting that jewel down to be absolutely right so that it’s the shortest, refined message for the end user, rather than try to make it something that we could take a segment out of and use in another video, which would inevitably have made both of those videos a bit longer. And that wouldn’t have been so good I don’t think.

Bob: It sounds like what you really want to focus on is instead of trying to manage assets, is make sure you get very comfortable with the tools that you’re using, and get to a point where when you sit down with a video or a screencast to do, you got a checklist that you’ve built up over time. You know “this is where I want to arrange my windows, this is what I want to get done in the first minute, this is the stuff that I need to make sure it’s off when I’m working,” rather than trying to leverage your assets.

Ian: Absolutely Bob, you’re completely right there. It’s all about boiling down the shortest message, and then making the right video and audio to get that message across. So, I really think each production has to be unique.

Patrick: My title is literally Evangelist, and we have an expression as evangelist. “Know your audience.”

Ian: Completely.

Patrick: And, I hear that’s a big part of the message you’re saying. It’s very different whether you’re putting a video up the front page of your site versus explaining to users who’ve already purchased your product versus your peers, etc, etc. Each one has different characteristics.

Ian: Totally. And that’s the reason why you see these 10 or 15-minute videos on the front page where the author, they’re technical. They know their product, they know want they want to say to the end user, and then they rattle or they prattle on. They spend too long focusing on some parts. Maybe they’ve got some errors in there and they apologize. They go back and start again.

They probably haven’t got much experience with their microphone, so the recording is very noisy, and then you’ve a presentation that’s just not very nice. But if they sat back and thought “who is my end user? What do they need to hear from me?” they would know, themselves, straightaway that they have to come up with a very different presentation. But they don’t think about that step, and they just give their demonstration rather than the demonstration that has to be given. It’s just that little bit of thinking beforehand, knowing your audience and then presenting to their needs. That’s exactly what you have to do.

Patrick: We had the pleasure of speaking with Lou Carbone a couple of weeks ago, who’s all about experiences, and a screencast is very much an experience with a customer or potential customer as well. To use my own take on this, I think you literally have to have empathy for the people who are going to be viewing your screencast. I think you have to imagine yourself in their shoes and care about them; actually care about not giving them a horrific experience if you want to do this successfully, in my opinion.

Ian: I completely agree. All you have to do as a MicroISV is sit down and think to yourself, “If I had five of my target customers in the room with me, what’s the 2-minute demo I would give to them?” Then you translate that into screencast. It’s as simple as that.

Patrick: One more question from the Joel on Software group. What is your opinion about the picture-in-picture talking head of the video of the person talking? So you like that, dislike it, are there case where it’s useful, cases where it’s not? What’s your take on that?

Ian: Right, I saw that’s and it’s an interesting one. When I’ve seen it used properly, it’s really nice because you don’t just hear somebody’s calm and confident friendly voice. You get to see their face as well, and you identify with that person. And if they’re smiling and they’re attentive, then it’s absolutely fabulous.

The only problem is, when you’ve got live video, you can’t overdub later, and you also can’t really cut the video up. So you have to have a 2-minute, very clear, very good presentation.

Right now, I’m sitting in front of a nice, big, high quality mic and it’s right in front of my head. If I try to get a camera looking at me, you would see the mic, and then my smile perhaps underneath it. It wouldn’t really give you the same effect. So I’ve tried playing with the technique and I’m just not so happy with either using the internal mic on my laptop and the camera that’s there, versus a camera that’s trying to avoid the big mic that I’ve got here. And so, so far, I’ve avoided that technique. But it does give quite a lot, and I feel that I’m missing out on something by not playing with that technique, and it’s something that now I’ve got the MacBook, and I’ve got new tools there to play with that I think I’ll be experimenting with.

Patrick: Actually, I have an experimental approach that I’ve been taking as well, and again, I’m very new to this, so this is new territory. But I shot a video screencast a week ago that I haven’t been able to cut yet – and I hope it comes out – where I left a video camera running with a room full of people huddled around a computer, and we’re going to have a little bit of a casual video conversation and then switch to the screen. What I liked about what I’ve seen so far is that it’s very conversation, which is appropriate for this audience.

But, I really liked the casual nature of switching back and forth. It’s more work than I expected to stitch it together, but mixing video and screen in that way, I’m hoping the end result… I have a vision. We’ll see if it turns out right.

Ian: Okay. Are you overdubbing the voice on the video segments or are you just recording whoever is interacting with you there and then?

Patrick: There’s a nice little zoom microphone that has amazing sound quality when you just set it in front of a table of people. I can get the good quality that I need from that. And I just left everything running. I’ll be able to transition things together, because the time wiseÖ

In other words, the video is not going to be shown the whole time. I’ll start with video transition to screen, potentially cut back to video if we pause and talk about a feature for a second, and the end result is going to be about 10 to 15 minutes long. Your silence scares me. You’re dubious about the surprise.

Ian: No, I’m quite intrigued by that. That’s a nice technique. I like the idea of that. Certainly, knitting other people into the presentation, that’s good. I like that.

Patrick: Well, I hope it turns out. I’ll send you a link when it’s done.

Ian: One thing that I’ve certainly realized, certainly running ShowMeDo, and then Karen, the other co-founder and I sat down and we presented material our way. Then we had a few other authors present their material. And I should just say, ShowMeDo is a very friendly, open-source community. If anyone wants to practice screencasting, come and join the community. Submit a screencast that teaches somebody something. As long as it’s friendly and open-source, we’re very accepting. It’s a great place to come and experiment with any techniques you’ve got.

The nice thing there is every author learns to do things in a different way, and so, they present differently. And they come back and say, “Well, hey, I didn’t script. I just talked off the top of my head. But then, I’ve been presenting for 5 years in front of professional audiences, so I’m used to doing this.” Whereas another one might sit there and always do a lot of scripting then rework the audio afterwards in a very careful and controlled fashion. Everyone experiments in different ways and so lots of new techniques get turned up.

There’s this one guy, he works in a school. He has a video camera and the video camera is on three of his students who’ll be there; one of them on a mic, one on the keyboard and one on the video camera itself. And you’ll see the three of them on the webcam whilst one of them is doing the screencast, and you’re seeing the whole desktop screen. So you see three kids teaching how to program with Python, in that case. So, you connect with kids in a classroom, as they’re talking and giggling and laughing away, teaching you Python programming. It’s a technique I never would have thought of myself, but it’s really nice to see these ways.

Patrick: What a fantastic resource. I’m going to check that out. Thank you for providing that. That’s wonderful.

Bob: You know, one of the things that I’m thinking right now is how do you communicate a reason in that 10-minute video or less that they’ll first see on your home page? In other words, how do you script that 2 minutes to get the most effect out of it? Should you show the thing you think is the hottest feature first, and say, “Okay, well I’ll show them that. That’ll get them interested enough to watch the rest of it.” Or, should you build up to that, and maybe that’s the last thing they see at the end of the 2-minute video? Do you have a preference in terms of focus and pacing?

Ian: It’s interesting. When you got a Website or an application, whatever the product you’re demonstrating, when it’s got one or two features, and they’re the clear, unique selling points, then you know exactly what it is you want to be demonstrating.

When you’ve got many features and many ways of using a tool, perhaps it becomes less clear. For me, I tend to ask the question, “If I had five of the target users in the room, what is it they want to know in 2 minutes?” And I try to boil down exactly the minimum feature set that I have to demonstrate to satisfy all of their needs, and from there, I tell a story around that.

Typically, you’ve only got time to show two or three features, perhaps, in a space of 2 minutes. Then the risk is you decide to show everything, and then that can go on for a half an hour, and that’s way too long. That’s when you want to have one 2-minute intro showing just the basic features, the ones everybody cares about that makes the user stick around for longer, and then perhaps, two or five more supporting videos, each a couple of minutes long showing one or two of the main features that are related. Then the end user can dip into the ones that they want and just see exactly what they need to find out if your product does what they need.

Bob: Let me ask you about something that I’ve noticed that I’m starting to use, and it’s called JING. It’s also from Techsmith. And what it let’s you do – it runs on the Mac, runs on a PC – is basically just capture what you’re doing video on your screen and audio. It’s not an editing tool, per se; it’s just sort of a capture tool. But what I find that it’s great for is when I’m doing various forms of tech support. I can show somebody how to do something, and do the cast of it, send it to them – it’s a 30-second, maybe 20-second little clip – and they get it. It’s a lot faster than writing up 14 different steps of instructions they’re not going follow in the first place.

I’m wondering two things. One is do you see a role for those types of quick and dirty videos? And two, do you see that they’re becoming more and more usable and useful now that the technology seems to be advancing?

Ian: So, just before I answer that, I will just say that you completely hit the nail on the head with the idea of tech support for the videos as well. Anyone in any startup knows that as soon as you start to get repetitive actions, it’s best to start automating the answers. And if you’re trying to script a 10-page help file that walks the user through some element of solving a problem, but a 30-second video would just solve that problem there and then, then of course, absolutely. Go and record the video the easiest way possible so that it suits the needs of the 10 people a week who have that problem. If you don’t get 10 support emails a week, perhaps, you’ve got more time to work on improving the product.

Now, when it comes to which tools to use to solve those kind of problems where they can be quick and dirty videos, why not use JING? Or Screen Toaster is another recent one, and there’s and older one, Screencast-O-Matic. They all work in the web, but I think they’re all Java-based. They’ll just record your desktop and you can normally download the movie afterwards and run it through FFmpeg perhaps, to convert it into FLV or MP4 for embedding in your site, or YouTube, perhaps. All you’ve got to do is get a video down that’s good enough for the end user with a problem, to watch it and get their problem solved. They don’t care about high production values at that point. They just want to get them getting past their problem, and if the video does the job, it does the job.

Now, I’m curious about these online tools. Today I meant, before this interview, to start playing with ScreenToaster, and I haven’t tried it yet. I used JING a while ago and it was quite nice, but I believe, at the beginning, there was no audio. But I think, Bob, am I right to say now it records audio as well?

Bob: It records to audio, and it makes it, just click, do what you have to do, click, wait maybe of 30 seconds, and on your clipboard is a URL that points to it. Stick that in the email, you’re done, you’re happy, off you go.

Ian: Wow, and that’s it. Techsmith is good at that kind of things. So yes, absolute. If you’ve got tech support problems, automate the solution, show a video clearly explaining how to solve that problem, put it in your Website. Use Jing, it’s free. Then, that’s it. You’ve saved some customer pain and you saved your own time. That’s the right way to go.

Bob: Well, as somebody who has written honestly, I’m not trying to exaggerate here, but probably in the area of about 10,000 pages of documentation for programs, oh my God. I’ll never do that again!

Patrick: I just want to follow up on what you said there. You know, that’s another good way if people want a little practice at this technique. You can go to Stack Overflow, look at some of the more complex questions, record a quick demonstration on Jing.com and then post a link to Stack Overflow. I don’t know how many people will follow it, but it’s appropriate for a complex question.

Ian: That’s a great idea, Pat.

Bob: That is a good idea, yes. That is a career enhancement technique.

Patrick: Yes, and it’s just a way to get practice and frankly, it’s probably a lot easier than typing out an understandable answer to some of the more complex questions on that site. It’s just a thought.

Bob: I think that’s a great thought, because again, let’s flip this around for a second and ask the question, “How do you differentiate yourself as a developer from all those other developers?” Well, one way is video.

Speaking of one way, is there a one particular video site, be it YouTube or Meeboo or whoever that you recommend that people take their screencast and put it up there the get more play?

Ian: Now, this is a tricky subject. In the past, the reason we started ShowMeDo was because YouTube and Revver at the time, were just starting and their video quality was just awful. So, screencasts, back then, which is three years ago, couldn’t be presented on the web in an automatic fashion in any way that was legible, so we started ShowMeDo. Since then, the quality of some sites has improved and Vimeo is pretty fantastic.

But, Vimeo recently announced that they’re fed up with too many people putting up screencasts that demonstrate their web app without paying any kind of service there, and advertising in their site. So they’re talking about removing screencast entirely from Vimeo, which is a real shame, because it’s the most crystal-clear video service for a screencast that I know of.

Now, screencast – I think it’s screencast.com, which is a Techsmith product – that used to be Screencast Hosting and you had to pay for everything. I believe there’s a free account now. It’s got a free model, so you can upload some videos and show them freely. But that’s normally for sharing personal videos around. There’s a very small visitor level there, so you wouldn’t get much exposure.

If you go to YouTube, and in as much I kind of hate to say it because YouTube is the lowest common denominator, but if you put a video in YouTube, I’ve got most of my Procast productions; they’re in both YouTube and in Vimeo. I easily get 10 times as many eyeballs in YouTube as I get in Vimeo with no promotion. Purely just the fact that the videos are in YouTube and there are so many people there, they get watched. It’s as simple as that.

Bob: Do you have any issues there as far as IP. In other words, when you post to, let’s say, YouTube, don’t you basically lose the rights to how that video gets used?

Ian: Yes, sure. Well, I support Creative Commons. I’m an open source advocate. I assume that anyone’s going to take any of my work and remix it and reuse it. Perhaps, if I label it non-commercial under Creative Commons license, I’d be really upset if YouTube went on and sold it. But the likelihood of them reselling a screencast of mine and making money out of it is pretty damn low, so hey, I don’t mind.

Bob: So, again, you’d rather give up control than be obscure.

Ian: Completely. It’s all about the publicity I think.

Bob: Yes. Any final advice for our listeners?

Ian: So, we’ve mentioned already that you ought to practice and you ought to know who your target audience is. There are plenty of tools, some open-source, some online, some commercial, so get the right tool for the job. Definitely practice.

The other really important point, and we didn’t touch on this earlier, is the audio quality. I’m guessing both of you guys have seen videos with just really awful voice-overs?

Bob: Yes.

Patrick: I have taken those.

Bob: I’ve done a few too.

Ian: With a bit of practice, it’s fairly easy to avoid those problems.

Some people, they muffle their voice. They put the mic right up to their lips and then you hear them breathing, and you hear them coughing down the mic. That can all be removed with post-production and that’s really worth doing. A serious problem is always that there’s background noise. So this hiss comes through, your electrical line noise. With a tool like Audacity, you can sample the line noise and ask it to remove it, and then you get a crystal-clear recording, as if you’re sitting in a very highly-priced sound booth, with perfect, beautiful, broadcast quality equipment. But, you’re doing it from a home PC. So, it’s really worth spending the extra half an hour exporting the audio, putting it into Audacity, removing any sections where you’re breathing, removing the noise, and then just generally cleaning it up.

If it’s not harsh on the ears, it’s a heck of a lot easier for an end user to sit back and watch your video. You just don’t feel like you’re being assaulted, which is kind of important if you want users to watch your video all the way through to the end. But I’d certainly say the audio quality is the other important thing. If you can sort that out, there’s no reason why most of your users won’t watch your 2-minute video and really get your message.

Bob: And let me tack onto that just one little thought which is when you’re ready to go pro, I think that Ian has made an excellent case for Procast and for his service, because like everything, having the tools is one thing, but being able to have a professional do it really, really, really kicks up the quality.

Ian: Well that’s it. We put days into it, and that’s something that most people just don’t want to do or shouldn’t have to do. So yes, if you need that, we’re here for you.

Patrick: I wanted to give one more quick shout-out as well that I use another shareware tool, about $50, called GoldWave that I’ve been using for years for some of my audio editing, and I just want to give them a shout-out as well.

Ian: Pat, was that GoldWave or GoldWay?

Patrick: GoldWave.com.

Ian: Okay. I haven’t heard of that. I’ll have a look.

And talking of shout-outs, I ought to mention HyperCam on Windows as well. That’s a shareware screencasting application. That’s more stable than the open-source one, CamStudio. I think it’s $40 or so, and the author’s very nice and very supported. It works on Vista as well as the rest of Windows.

Can I mention the screencast series on the blog?

Bob: Please do.

Ian: Also on the Procast blog, so that’s blog.procast.co.uk, I’m also writing a nine-part series on how to make the perfect screencast, and I’m distilling all the advice that I’m giving here. I’m planning at the end of the nine-part blog series to write it up into an e-book, because I really want to encourage more and more people to get involved in screencasting. The ecosystem is quite small at the moment, and I figure if I give away four year’s worth of advice, and it’s advice that comes with my team of 5 as well, then we can encourage more people to get involved in the art. That means people use it, and ultimately, more people need my services, so it’s kind of self-serving.

But I really want to just encourage as many people as possible to try screencasting themselves. So come and check out the Procast blog and find the series there.

Bob: I’m going to be doing that and I’m looking forward to that e-book.

Ian, thank you so much. This has been a really interesting, in-depth look at how to do screencasts. I think the people listening to this podcast are in for a treat.

Ian: Cool.

Patrick: Thank you, Ian.

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Go to Microsoft.com/web for more information.

That’s our show this week. Thanks for listening and tune in next time to Startup Success with Bob Walsh and Patrick Foley.

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Looking for a professional screen cast? Get in touch today via www.procasts.co.uk.

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