Let me say – waking up to discover that our screencast for newly-relaunched US ecommerce site Ztail is featured in their TechCrunch coverage is really rather cool.

We deliberately added the screencast into YouTube for them so it could be easily added to blogs and news-outlets for increased coverage.  Initially they used Vimeo (but strictly-speaking that’s against Vimeo’s T&Cs) and then switched to YouTube so the peak viewership was recorded at Vimeo (but that’s now deleted).

Ztail host their own copy on their home-page.

Ellen worked with us to re-write the script using AIDA and other techniques to pique the viewer’s interest and keep those that could benefit from Ztail’s service watching through-out.

I’m very proud to say that we’ve been given the Screencast of the Week (twitter) award by TechSmith, makers of the excellent CamTasia (our main screencasting tool).  The award is for our Adblock Plus video, we made it as part of our open-source advocacy drive.  It is viewed 600 times a day in the adblockplus.org website and has 39 five-out-of-five ratings.

“I liked this screencast for several reasons. Ian made great use of Camtasia Studio’s SmartFocus feature – he used it to focus your attention on certain areas of the screen and show greater detail.

The audio quality is great on this screencast which is important as viewers are generally intolerant of poor audio. The background audio music was a great touch and added polish to the screencast. And, Ian has a great voice for narration! The screencast runs 1:32 and is short and to the point. Perfect!”

Our video has also been given 3 awards by YouTube for making highly-popular content.

We’re rather chuffed to say that our screencast that explains the open-source Adblock Plus plug-in (Washington Post) is the 15th most popular video in YouTube’s Sci/Tech category this month.  We created this screencast with Wladimir (Adblock’s author) to explain how the plug-in works, how to get it and how to get support.

This screencast is second only to a screencast by Google on Privacy which puts us in with rather forward-thinking company.

With 600 views a day (we’re guessing 16,000 views for this month) and 36 feedbacks of 5/5 this screencast is a great way for us to give back to the open-source community and to help explain this very useful plug-in to potential new users.  It also reduces Wladimir’s support burden as more users know what to expect when they install it and how to get help in the forum if they have questions.

We’re also honoured in two other categories, in total:

• #15 – Most Viewed (This Month) – Science & Technology
• #64 – Top Rated (This Month) – Science & Technology
• #57 – Top Favourited (This Month) – Science & Technology

The quest for the ‘quiet PC’ is always a challenge for any audio engineer.  A standard PC has several fans, each of which contributes background noise that a sensitive microphone will pick-up.  It is easy enough to remove the background noise in post-production but the ideal situation is to keep your source signal as clean as possible.

My sE2200a is a wonderful mic and annoyingly my case fan has been showing its age, over the last few months it has noticeably become louder.  My quest for the best solution took me to Noctua.at, they produce high-end fans.  My choice was the NF-R8, reviews are always positive.

Using my sE2200a and Audacity I recorded the original case noise-level (-30dB) and the improved noise-level (-36dB), for this I ran Audacity on my MacBook with the mic placed at the back of the PC.  The PC and mic were kept in exactly the same position between the tests.

The 6dB noise reduction comes with the use of the Low Noise Adapter (L.N.A.), the earlier review suggested that this was the most effective to reduce noise (the Ultra L.N.A. is too wimpy).  The L.N.A. is just a resistor that sits in-line with the power-supply.

This fan is the first I’ve mounted using rubber screw-replacing ‘vibration compensators’.  These are the same shape as screws but are long rubber fixers that you pull through the case – they cut down the vibrations that the fan could transmit into the case.

All in I’m very happy with the NF-R8, the reduction in noise is quiet evident and this means even clearer recordings for me than I’d achieved before.

Over Christmas I’d spoken to Wladimir Palant of the Adblock Plus project, Adblock (you guessed it…) strips ads from within Firefox.   Some of his users had trouble understanding how the plug-in worked and how to get it installed.  We offered to do some open-source advocacy where we’d explain how to get started and find help for Adblock Plus in just over a minute.

Richard and I put time into developing a brief, scripting, storyboarding, animating and screencasting this short tutorial and we’re really rather happy with the result.  A higher quality version is listed on our usual Examples page, we decided to go with YouTube since it makes it easy for a viewer to embed it in their blog for advocacy.

Wladimir has a nice entry about our work, I’ve also covered it as has Richard.  This screencast is our 3rd for open-source advocacy after Django in Under a Minute and IE8 vs Firefox 3.  The open-source advocacy effort builds upon the fact that I’m a co-founder of ShowMeDo and have created over 130 tutorial screencasts about open-source.

Screencasts are an effective tool for converting first-time visitors into signed-up users.  Improving your conversion rate is an often-overlooked part of the sales process yet you can save money and lose fewer visitors to competitors by embracing this technology.

Companies like Google and 37Signals have educated users to expect screencasts – have you profited from their benefits?

Your first-time visitors are often in a hurry to find the right solution to their problem – if you don’t effectively communicate all your benefits and answer their questions, the user could well return to google and find your competitors.

The symptom is high bounce-rates – you can easily improve these bounce-rates using a front-page screencast to teach your new visitors why you are the solution to their problem.

Don’t buy more traffic when you can easily convert more of your existing visitors into users!

Why do visitors like screencasts?

1. Nothing to install – they can watch passively and learn a great deal
2. No evaluation process – you demonstrate all they need to see
3. No need for annoying sign-ups or tool installation – they see it all working presented by a clear, calm, confident voice

“With technology advancing it is often better to see (and compare) new tools in action. … screencasts make it so easy to see what’s changed.” – Matt Sarjent (Senior Programmer) (source)

If the screencast demonstrates a solution to the user’s needs then they’ll want to know how to get involved.  You can further improve your conversions by showing them exactly how to sign-up to your service with a strong call to action – this removes another potential barrier to getting them involved and makes for more satisfied users

“My bounce rate has decreased about 7 percent per day. Since having the screencast up, the site’s sign up rate has doubled.” – Justin (CEO AppBeacon.com) (source)

The improvement in sign-ups and engagement-time give you a clear financial incentive to investigate screencasts.  Adding the video into your site is straight-forward, you can also track viewing metrics to understand how often the video is viewed:

“Within an hour, I had the video up on the site and had people watching it.” – Justin (CEO AppBeacon) (source)

Would you like to learn more about screencasting?  Watch our examples to see how other companies have lowered their costs by using screencasts to convert more visitors into users.

Justin of AppBeacon had a problem – too many users bounced from his site and didn’t learn how to find new iPhone and iPodTouch apps in his improved alternative to iTunes.  Before Christmas he wanted a solution that would decrease bounces and increase sign-ups.

On December 23th he tweeted asking for a professional screencaster hoping to get a new screencast in place for the Christmas season.  Crazy short timing!

Justin found ProCasts through Google – even though I’d planned to take the Christmas week off I could see the sense in delivering his screencast before Christmas.  iPhones were bound to be popular presents and indeed the iTunes store saw a 413% increase in traffic on Christmas Day compared to last Christmas.

In the space of 48 hours we agreed a script and I delivered this finished video for his frontpage on Christmas Eve – just in time for Christmas!

Introducing AppBeacon – a friendlier iTunes for iPhone/iPodTouch Apps from IanProCastsCoUk on Vimeo.

Justin has written-up the process – here’s the main benefit:

“My bounce rate has decreased about 7 percent per day.  Since having the screencast up, the site’s sign up rate has doubled”

He kindly adds:

“I would strongly suggest that anyone needing a screencast consider using Ian at ProCasts [my emph.].  He was very professional and provided great feedback and suggestions for making the screencast better.  I really appreciate his dedication and effort in getting the AppBeacon screencast completed before Christmas.”

The iFart application was featured – not by intent!  It appeared during the take and I already knew that it was a very popular app (techcrunch).  I figured that Justin could use the iFart appearence for marketing – and indeed he did (and despite the lack of votes this sent him several hundred visits alone):

“…I got some traffic from social media sites pointing out this little embarrassing situation.  I realized that this was actually going to help drive some traffic to the site.”

Do you need a professional screencast?  Do you want to get more sign-ups, more customer trials and educate more users about your software?  Get in touch and we’ll help you out.

In CamTasia 6 we are forced to use .mp4 as our web-friendly output format, this replaces the venerable .flv format from CamTasia 5 and earlier.  This has caused some upset in the forums.

I’ve already covered how to convert CamTasia 6 mp4 screencasts to flv, what concerns me is the availability of mp4-enabled players.  Do enough users have an mp4-compatible player?  If not, how many see nothing when presented with an mp4 screencast?  I’ve raised this question in the TechSmith forums.

Troy Stein, CamTasia’s Product Manager, provided some explanation but didn’t offer solutions.

“When we saw the results of MPEG4 output in our early CS 6 development work, we knew that FLV had a short shelf life. The MPEG4 files have better quality, often smaller file sizes, better playback on portable devices and produce faster than FLVs”

Currently over 98% of installed Flash players support Flash 7 and the FLV format (source: Adobe Flash Player Version Penetration, updated September 2008).  The same statistics show support for MP4 (via Flash Player v9.0.115 or better) is  limited to 89% of installed players.

This means that 11% of visitors cannot view MP4 content vs 2% of visitors who cannot view FLV content, as counted by Adobe.  The MP4-compatible version of Flash was released in 2007 (zdnet) and had over 80% penetration by July 2008.

Since Adobe’s statistics were recorded in September 2008 I wanted to see whether the results still held true now in January 2009.

I verified these statistics against real-world sites using December’s visitor count – I checked ShowMeDo.com (large screencast-based video education site, I’m a co-founder), IanOzsvald.com (my own blog, tech-savvy readers) and ProCasts.co.uk (this site) using the installed Google Analytics.

Monthly visitor counts are:

• ShowMeDo.com 100,000 (3 years+)
• IanOzsvald.com 1,500 (3 years+)
• ProCasts.co.uk 300 (6 months)

Counting the percentage of visitors who have Flash Player 9.0.115 or better we see:

• ShowMeDo.com 86%
• IanOzsvald.com 84%
• ProCasts.co.uk 96%

Using real-world sites that focus on a Western (US+European) tech-savvy audience we see that 85% of the majority of these visitors can see MP4-enabled content.  The other 15% probably can’t view the MP4 videos – they just see a link to the raw file or an error in Flash.  I’ll wager that many tech-focused sites see similar statistics – over 80% penetration but less than 90%.  If the tech-focused sites see less than 90%, how much worse does it get for general-folk-focused sites?

Possibly we follow jimb’s solution and support two versions of the video simultaneously.  Alternatively we export using mp4 and convert to flv until these percentages improve.

Perhaps someone else has an alternative solution?

Are you having trouble converting CamTasia 6’s mp4 screencasts into the older flv format that we had in CamTasia 5 (and earlier)?

CamTasia 6 doesn’t include FLV as an output option – many of us have used it consistently in CamTasia 5 with JW FLV Media Player and TechSmith’s decision to remove it has caused some headaches.

ffmpeg is a free tool that easily allows us to convert .mp4 screencasts into .flv screencasts.  Note that complex screencasts generate larger files – the mp4 example below is 10mb in size, the flv version with a similar visual quality is 20mb!

For testing I used my recent AppBeacon.com screencast.  The version on Justin’s site is exported from CamTasia 5 using FLV using these custom settings:

• 15 frames per second (fps)
• 10 frames between key frames
• Variable 2-pass bitrate control
• 2000 kbps max bit rate
• MP3 22kHz Mono 96kBits/sec audio

Get ffmpeg exes from tripp.arrozcru.org (via the official ffmpeg site).  I’m using 15625, the latest version (15815) crashed on my XP.  Extract the compressed .7z using 7-zip.

For simplicity, extrac ffmpeg.exe and copy it into your working video directory.  For long-term use add the ffmpeg directory into your path (else you have to copy ffmpeg.exe to your new project’s working directory each time).

The format to generate FLV output at the command line is:

ffmpeg -i INPUT -f flv -s WIDTHxHEIGHT -r 10fps -b 2000kbps -g 100
-acodec libmp3lame -ar 22050 -ab 48000 -ac 1 -y OUTPUT

The upper-case values need to be set by you, the rest of the values are good starting points for small files:

• INPUT is e.g. vid.avi or vid.mp4
• WIDTH is e.g. 640
• HEIGHT is e.g. 480
• OUTPUT is e.g. vid.flv

An example format to convert ‘vid.mp4′ into ‘vid.flv’ with a final size of 640×480 would be:

ffmpeg -i vid.avi -f flv -s 640x480 -r 10fps -b 2000kbps -g 100
-acodec libmp3lame -ar 22050 -ab 48000 -ac 1 -y vid.flv

The flags are:

• -f flv sets the output format to FLV
• -s 640×480 sets the output size, use e.g. 320×240 for a blog post
• -b 2000kbps sets the bitrate for the video, 2000 is fine for 640×480, use a smaller number if your output size is smaller
• -g 100 sets the gopsize (‘group of pictures’) to 100, this is ‘frames between a keyframe’, the keyframes are seek points and 100 is a large number (see below)
• -acodec libmp3lame gives mp3 which is required by flv videos
• -ar 22050 sets the audio rate to 22050Hz
• -ab 48000 sets the audio bitrate to 48kHz (i.e. high quality)
• -ac 1 sets the audio channels to 1 (i.e. mono)
• -r 10 fps set 10 frames-per-second, use a higher number for smoother animation (e.g. 25), larger numbers cause larger files
• -y is ‘force overwrite output file if exists’ (optional)

First I generated an mp4 version of the AppBeacon FLV file using CamTasia 6, the result is AppBeaconAutofps800kbps.mp4 (10mb).

Next I tried a variety of settings, finally settling on:

ffmpeg -i AppBeacon.mp4 -f flv -s 640x480 -r 15fps -b 700kbps -g 10
-acodec libmp3lame -ar 22050 -ab 48000 -ac 1 -y AppBeacon.flv

This generates AppBeacon15fps700kbps.flv (20mb) which has a similar size to the CamTasia 5 output and a similar quality.

Note the increased frame rate (15 fps), shorter gop size (10) and lower max bitrate (700kbps).

Now you have a simple, controllable way to convert CamTasia 6’s mp4 screencasts into flv files as generated by CamTasia 5.

Would you like a free eBook that covers all of this information (and more)? Our Little Book of Screencasting is in the works, to receive a notification when we release it send an email to: ebook_notify@procasts.co.uk

ProCasts exists to create high-quality custom screencasts for you, so we can demonstrate your software 24/7 to your visitors.

Screencasts are an excellent method of showing your first-time visitors exactly why they should pay attention to your software.  If you show them their problem, and how you solve it, they’ll stick around to learn more about you.

We aim to increase conversions of first-time visitors into users of your software (be it a web-app or downloadable software) and to promote your tool via video-sharing sites like Vimo and YouTube to increase your exposure.  You can see a selection of  screencast examples, and learn how we make professional screencasts if you’d like more detail.