Having dealt with the need for a well-recorded narration, you should also consider using an animated logo, animated segments and slides.  Each has their place in a professional-looking screencast.  This is part 9 of our screencast tutorial series.

Animated logo:

When a screencast start with an animated logo, maybe 3-5 seconds in length, it stands out from other screencasts as being ‘a bit special’. The simple reason is that most people don’t have the skill to create animations so they are avoided, so anyone creating a screencast with an animation has clearly gone the extra mile.

Leaving out the animation is a mistake – animators are easy to find (I recommend our Richard if you’d like to out-source this task) and are happy to create a short animation around your logo or graphical assets.  You can integrate the animation as a short video segment in your video editor so the backing music and narration flow over the top.

You can see a simple and very effective example here for Kontagent, this is the video we created for their homepage, it includes a 4 second opening animation:

“We also have a cool new marketing video, which was produced by the great guys over at Procasts in the UK. If you need a demo video done, you should definitely check them out at ProCasts.” – Jeff Tseng (founder)

Animations and Slides:

You can further differentiate your screencasts from other run-of-the-mill recordings by using other packages such as Adobe AfterEffects.  For the open-source ad filter AdblockPlus we chose to ‘embed’ the screencast into a computer monitor – the audience includes many first-time Firefox users so we wanted to give the viewer plenty of context so they understood what we were showing them.

The result has been an overwhelming success – the screencast is embedded in AdblockPlus.org’s homepage where it gets 600 views a day, it has over 79 five-out-of-five ratings at YouTube and has won several awards.  This wouldn’t have been possible with us going the extra mile and using AfterEffects.

Now you’re at the end of our 9-part screencast tutorial.  If you found it useful please do leave a comment.  You will probably want to receive a notification about the forthcoming eBook (see below) for more information about screencasting.

Do you want more of your visitors to use your software? We make professional screencasts.  Get in Contact and we’ll help you convert more visitors into users, sell more of your software and reduce your support costs.

Become a better screencaster – read The Screencasting Handbook.  We’re distilling 4 years of experience into our book, this blog series you’re reading was the first inspiration that we should write everything we know into a book to make you a better screencaster.

The Screencast Tutorial Part 9 – Polish for your screencast with animations and slides by ProCasts' Blog about Professional Screencast Production, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England License.

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