I’m happy to say that TheScreencastingHandbook.com, our eBook about screencasting, is now live.  Right now we have the main site online with an email sign-up box.

Today I’m fleshing out the planned chapter list, I’m hoping to have a first version of Chapter 1 ready for mid-August.

We’ve spent the last few months surveying the needs of many people so we have a pretty good idea of what we need to deliver.  As described on the site, we’ll be releasing chapters as they are written and iterating as we go, the aim is to make sure we’re really answering the questions that matter to you.

As a bonus we’re throwing in 30 mintues of email consultation with us for free (usual price: £50 GBP) and we’ve created a google-group that is only available to purchasers.

If you want to see a list of the topics we’re covering that will make you a better screencaster, sign-up to The Screencasting Handbook and we’ll keep you informed about our progress.

Don McAllister, founder of ScreencastsOnline (Mac-focused screencasts) was kind enough to answer some questions about how and why he started screencasting for the Mac back in 2005.

Don started ScreencastsOnline around the time I was co-founding ShowMeDo (open-source software focused tutorial screencasts).

You started ScreencastsOnline in 2005 a touch before ShowMeDo.com started, do you have a potted history anywhere to inspire others?

The show originally started out as a hobby with a tutorial every week. I found I was spending more and more of my free time working on the show to try and keep making better and better quality screencasts.

Eventually, it got to the point where I thought I could make a business from my efforts and with some encouragement (or some might say foolhardiness), I decided to go full time.

Screencasting takes time and effort – what made you decide to share your knowledge in this form?

I think that screencasts appeal to a certain type of person. Those people who learn things visually. I’ve had countless emails from people who struggle learning from a manual but if they watch a 15 minute screencast, they instantly “get it”.  The fact that it’s a direct video of the computer screen allows people to see immediately what is required and how to use applications.

I see you’ve just recently recorded your 200th show (congrats!) – what skills took the longest to learn over the last few years?

Probably being able to keep continuity as you record. Knowing how to recover from making a mistake and rolling back so that you keep editing down to a minimum. You can always (well mostly always) fix errors in post production but I’ve developed certain tricks to help minimise any tweaking. Visual continuity is extremely important in creating a screencast.

You’ve been at this for 4 years – how long was it before you realised ScreencastsOnline could pay your salary full-time?

I started the Extra! membership scheme about 6 months following the initial launch of the podcast. It’s basically a way for members to access “Premium Content”.

The deal is for a low cost six month membership ($57) you get access to a brand new show every week for six months, a choice of resolutions from HD to iPhone, specially formatted versions of the shows with chapter markings for easy navigation and access to a members website.

You also get immediate access to a back catalogue of over 200+ HD screencasts. After the initial six months, it’s only $25 to renew each six months. The take up of the membership took a while to kick in but with the immediate access to 200+ screencasts as well as all the new ones, it’s a very attractive deal for new members.

From what I remember your transition into ScreencastsOnline to full-time work was gradual.  Do you have any tips for someone else wanting to follow in your footsteps?

It’s not easy but you need to have a plan and have multiple ways of bringing in some income. Whether it be a membership scheme, advertising, sponsorship or even setting yourself up as a production resource to do commissioned screencasts, you need to be able to spread out your risks.

You’ve explained the equipment and software you use here – how many iterations did you go through finding the perfect setup?  I’m on my 4th mic now – was it the same for you?

I must admit, I’ve not really changed my audio setup for quite a while. Whilst people are commenting on the quality of the video and the audio, I really don’t want to change it. I do change my computers though, well, you have to don’t you!

Some people use screencasts to educate (such as our ShowMeDo authors and school teachers) – do you have any tips on how they could get started with screencasting?

The easiest way is just to try it. I’d recommend getting a copy of ScreenFlow and seeing if it’s something you’re comfortable with doing. ScreenFlow isn’t cheap but it will take away the pain of editing and exporting video as it’s a self contained package.

Try and record a couple of dummy screencasts and see if it’s something you can cope with. It does take a bit of practice to be able to speak and drive the application at the same time.

Other people use screencasts to help sell or support their software – what do you think makes for a perfect demo of a software tool?

For a demo, it needs to be short and sweet. You need to cover all of the major selling points and advantages of the software but keep the screencast flowing. Invariably, this means carefully scripting the screencast.

I’ve noticed that it can take me just as long (if not longer) to record and edit a scripted three minute promo screencast as it does to create a 30 minute free flowing tutorial.  It’s really hard to get it just right!

Become a better screencaster – read The Screencasting Handbook.  We’re distilling 4 years of experience into our book, the book will contain everything you need to improve your skills and produce great screencasts faster.

I’m in the planning stages for our forthcoming eBook that will teach you everything we know about producing screencasts.  Some of the topics we could cover include:

• Using screencasts for Sales, Training and Technical Support
• Story-boarding to explain all your benefits and features
• Writing a short, powerful script that really grabs the viewer’s attention
• Techniques for converting your viewer into a user of your software
• The best software packages to use when recording and editing a screencast
• Editing competently so you have a short, polished video
• Using annotations, fades and high-lights to focus the viewer’s attention on the key points
• Improving your audio recording
• Critiques of existing screencasts including ways of improving them
• Check-lists for each step of the process so you can quickly complete each phase confidently

We want to make sure we’re covering all the right topics that teach you the things you need to know.  To that end I’m undertaking various lines of research including using a survey – I’d like to invite you to share your needs with us.

To be in the draw for the free license, spend 5 minutes filling in the survey (no registration required).  It has just 10 questions so it won’t take you long.  If you put your email address in at the top of the survey then you will be in the draw.

I’ve just finished producing a series for ShowMeDo (I co-founded ShowMeDo in 2005) for OpenOffice Writer users.  In OpenOffice 3.1 Writer for Microsoft Word users I spend 45 minutes covering 11 topics for the new Writer user aimed at easing their transition across from MS Office:

1. Series Overview in 4 minutes (OpenOffice 3.1 for Word users)
2. Installing OpenOffice 3.1 on Windows XP
3. Working with Word (.doc) files
4. Working with an OpenDocument Format (.odt) file
5. Help! Manuals, Forums and Mail lists
6. Basic Formatting (bold, italic etc)
7. Exporting to PDF, HTML, MediaWiki
8. Printing
9. Word-completion
10. Find and Replace, Undo
11. Spell Checker

I’ve authored over 130 tutorial videos at ShowMeDo (see Ian’s author page) and the majority of the videos in the Club (which generates ShowMeDo’s income) were researched, scripted and recorded by me.

If you want to learn Python or OpenOffice then do take a look at ShowMeDo, there are over 1,000 tutorial videos (the majority are free, produced by our community) covering all sorts of open-source topics.

Mo Flanagan uses a 27 second mute screencast to show his WindowTabs.

This was one of the first screencasts I’d seen uploaded to YouTube using HD, even though it is mute and with annotations you still get a lot of information on how the product works:

The Good:

• Short, just 27 seconds long
• High Def so the visuals are crystal-clear
• Easy to follow – the Windows are joined and separated, it all looks very easy
• Easy embedding – YouTube is used so I, as a reviewer, can easily embed the screencast here (great for wider exposure)
• Public statistics – over 1,080 views at YouTube in under 2 months so Mo is obviously getting exposure (the fact that others are paying attention gives me confidence)

The Bad:

• No narration – so no explanation of what’s going on and the benefits to the end user
• No music – music is nice to set the scene on a marketing screencast
• No call to action – I get to the end of screencast and I’m interested…but what should I do next? What if I have a question?

Improvements:

• Add narration! Tell a useful story, explain the benefits, tell the user why this is great for them
• Add a call-to-action – you’ve got their interest, tell them how to get started right now and what to do if they have a question
• Answer any fears – remind the user about the money-back guarantee (this could just be in a text call-out) and the fact that it is both easily tried and easily removed
• Add testimonials into the video – let me see Social Proof that other people are using WindowTabs and that they find it beneficial

Our screencast tutorial series gives tips on all the above points.

If you’d like a private review of your own screencasts and advice on improving their quality, we offer this as a service, just get in Contact.

CloudBerry are building a set of Amazon S3 tools, for their S3 Explorer Pro they have two screencasts which show you how to get started.  I’ll critique the first, it is shown below:

The Good:

• The video is short (2:30) and moves along at an OK pace
• The demo works fine and the product looks easy enough to use
• The video is hosted by YouTube in HD so the visual aspects are very clear
• YouTube is used so external sites can embed the video to drive extra traffic like this one.

The Bad:

• Background hum, probably from the mains electricity, this is really distracting.  There’s also some street noise near the end
• Non-native English narration – I can understand it but I’d imagine other international users might have trouble which will reduce the audience
• No call-to-action – if your viewer watches right to the end then they’re probably interested – tell them how to try your tool and how to get their questions answered
• The videos aren’t embedded in the product page but are hidden behind a red ‘Watch Product Video’ link

Possible Improvements:

• The audio must be fixed, I’ve written about how bad audio can really reduce a viewer’s perception of the quality of your product.  Always use a good mic in a quiet environment and perform an audio clean-up step in post-production if necessary
• Many frames could have been cut in post-production to cut out 15-30 seconds of dead footage
• A call-to-action at the end will remind interested users how they too can try your product (remember: Don’t Make Me Think!)
• Embed the videos on the Product page, possibly using a javascript pop-up box (like here in ProCasts), so the user doesn’t have to visit other pages to find the videos

If you’d like a private review of your own screencasts and advice on improving their quality, we offer this as a service, just get in Contact.

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.

So far we’ve covered scripting, visuals and recording in this screencast tutorial.  What about the audio?  The quality of your audio really matters.  If you get your audio wrong, the perceived quality of your video will be lower than if you had reasonable audio but poor video!

“And audio has even been shown to affect the audience perception of the quality of a presentation more than the visuals.
…
So, sound has the power to raise (or lower) audience perception of visuals, but visual doesn’t have the power to change how the audience perceives the audio.” – Creating Passionate Users, January 2005

There are some basics that you can easily take care of:

• Don’t use a 3.5mm jack-plug el-cheapo mic.  The 3.5mm mic is analogue, the sound is sampled inside your computer and typically electrical noise from the motherboard is introduced into the audio.  This raises the background noise level which lowers the audio’s perceived quality.  Also – cheap mic typically have poor-quality microphone components which distort your voice
• Do use a USB mic or more expensive specialist hardware.  £40UK (approximately $60USD) USB microphones are far superior to 3.5mm mics.  Here at ProCasts HQ we use £300’s worth of sE2200A condenser mic (details below), phantom power and a FastTrack USB XLR to USB converter
• Prefer a condenser mic to a dynamic mic (note – condensors normally require their own power source and are often more expensive)
• Only ever record in a quiet room.  Background noise like birds, traffic, rain can’t really be removed.  You can try with a tool like Audacity but the general rule is that you should always start with the cleanest audio recording you can manage
• Practice your script beforehand – this way you’ll avoid ‘ums’, ‘errs’ and the like
• Do some practice recordings to check for sibilants and plosives (’esses’ and ‘pees or bees’).  You can edit these out with an audio editor (see a demo in our Audacity screencast above) but generally you want to practice moving your mic so the source recording has the fewest number of problems
• If the plosives (above) are a problem, hear the difference in Gasto’s screencast on using a pop filter at ShowMeDo.

At the end of the day if you want really clear narration that picks up all the nuances of a human voice you do need to spend several hundred pounds on good audio equipment, or out-source the job to a professional (we can help you there).

Better mics pick up more background noise and are less forgiving of blasts of energy (e.g. from plosives) so you need an ever quieter environment and a better control over your voice.

One of my first problems when starting with professional voice recording was knowing just how ‘good’ a mic could be, if I hadn’t already bought an expensive mic?  The kind folk at TechSmith have recorded the same voice to 6 microphones of varying quality, now you can easily hear how a better mic really improves the voice recording.

• Samson C03U – $210.00 USD (MSRP)
• Lapel Microphone – $49.95 (USD)
• Logitech QuickCam Communicate Deluxe Webcam – apx $79.99 USD (MSRP)
• Blue Snowball – $99.00 USD (MSRP)
• Logitech Headset – $39.99 USD (MSRP)
• Audio-Technica AT2020USB – $249.00 USD (MSRP)

Here at ProCasts we use an sE2200A mic, this is a high-quality condenser mic that requires its own power-supply and outputs the signal to a full-size XLR connector, this is then converted to USB via a FastTrack USB device.  We also use a big stand so the mic can be positioned above the head and moved around to get the best voice quality.

Previously we’ve used a Shure SM57, and Audio Technica ATM 73a.  I found that the SM57 picked up my strong sibilants and the ATM73a recorded my voice without much range so I sounded very flat.  The sE2200A is far superior to these mics, it records my full range and doesn’t accentuate sibilants or plosives.

For further information, read David Kane’s article ISVs Are In The Business of Software, Not Audio that explains why business-owners shouldn’t try to make their own pro-audio recording.  Whilst this might feel a bit off-putting, it does explain all the complexities that you need to be aware of if you do want to get over the the hump of poor audio recordings.

The final step in this 9-part tutorial is on ways to improve the visuals of your screencast.

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.

Previously in this screencast tutorial series we looked at embedding your screencast in your site, here we’ll discuss how you can get more publicity for your screencast.

Having produced a screencast you may want to get extra viewers using video-sharing sites.  This also makes the video easily embedded into a viewer’s blog – obviously this will only happen if the screencast is interesting to the viewer!  Social news site are sometime receptive of screencast information, I list some details at the end.

As ever if you want people to spread your message you have to give them something that they want to talk about.  If your service is new and you have an interesting product then new-sites and bloggers are likely to use your screencast if it is easy to embed -  our Ztail screencast was used by TechCrunch (Ztail Launches Innovative eBay Guarantee) in their promo piece.

For an example of a highly-rated tutorial screencast that is embedded into many sites, see our Adblock Plus screencast at YouTube.

The easiest sharing site to use is YouTube, the quality of their reproduction is far higher than it used to be.  If you upload with HD dimensions then they’ll offer an HD version which is much clearer, see this ie6update screencast we made that we uploaded in HD:

Vimeo also offer high-quality screencast reproductions but they have strong Terms and Conditions against promotional material.  They allow ’show-reel’ work from professional producers so you can see some of our work in Vimeo but if you make your own promotional screencast that is used to sell a product then you can’t upload it to Vimeo.

If your screencast is educational or about open-source then you can definitely upload it to ShowMeDo.com (I’m a co-founder).  This is an educationally-focused screencast site that supports open-source (only FOSS, not commercial tools) with a viewership of 100,000 visitors a month.

Other sites include MetaCafe, Veoh and Viddler.

Our own observations backed by others like Tubemogul suggest that YouTube will give you over 4 times as many eyeballs as other sites like Vimeo.  Whether these extra eyeballs have any true value is hard to say (just as digg.com’s traffic is often of little value) but given the ease of uploading – it cannot hurt.  Tubemogul’s research suggests that the second most popular video site (Yahoo!) has only 24% of YouTube’s eyeballs.

Social news sites may be useful to you but their users tend to have strong views about what’s interesting to them and what isn’t.  ShowMeDo’s educational screencasts are well-received at Reddit.com (my Reddit account), our screencast tutorial posts get votes at DZone.com (my DZone account).  Neither types of content seem to work at Digg.com.

You’ll be wasting your time trying to push useless content into these sites so save your effort, don’t spam (you’ll just be downvoted anyhow) and find somewhere that will find your content useful.

Joel’s Business of Software forums have threads on the use of screencasts like these two.  If you’re asking a question that fits the forum then you’ll get useful feedback from the other business owners there.  Do not spam this forum, you’ll be quickly deleted if you do!

Next – how to make your audio sound like it was professionally recorded.

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.

Having created and exported your screencast now you’ll want to host it somewhere so you can show it to your visitors.  The two main options are to host it externally or internally.  You are in episode 6 of 9 in this screencast tutorial series.

We’ll discuss external hosting with sites like YouTube, Vimeo and Screencast.com in the next episode.  Here we’ll discuss internal hosting – i.e. hosting the video on your own sites.

These are your obvious internal hosting options:

• FTP in your site
• FTP on a separate site
• Amazon S3
• Content Delivery Network

Inside ShowMeDo (co-founded in 2005) we serve 1TB of data (around 60,000 screencasts) a month using commodity FTP hosting.  Initially we used GoDaddy’s premium accounts and now we use a machine at WebFaction.  Generally speaking commodity hosting is cheap as chips and serves screencasts faster than they can be viewed which is what you want.

If you use your own site’s FTP allocation to serve your screencast then there’s a possibility that you’ll run out of bandwidth if you have a lean account (yes, they still exist).  If that’s the case spend some extra cash and get yourself a separate FTP host, WebFaction do a fine job.

Amazon’s S3 is pretty good, we’ve been experimenting with it.  S3 is a part of Amazon Web Services.  It doesn’t always serve screencasts fast enough but they do offer a Content Delivery Network (focusing on the US and Europe) which is bound to improve.  I have seen other companies use S3 and the results have been pretty decent.  The nice thing with S3 is you only pay for the bandwidth that’s been used.

Finally you could use a CDN like Akamai.  Typically these are expensive and only useful if you’re serving many copies of your screencast every day.  At a rough guess I’d suggest not worrying about a CDN until you’re serving over 2,000 views each day or if you have a strong viewerbase in a different country to your FTP host.

When looking to host the screencast in your site you have a choice of two main players – the long-standing JW FLV Media Player and the newer FlowPlayer.

Inside ProCasts we use the JW player (see our screencast examples), it is very well-supported, supports statistics and Google Analytics, skinning and plugins (e.g. for subtitles).  For non-commercial use it is free, for commercial use the license is very cheap (30Euros).

FlowPlayer is used by many and has growing acceptance, our client LiveDrive use it on their Demos page.  It appears to support Google Analytics but doesn’t seem to support custom event tracking.

Next – getting more exposure using sites like YouTube, Vimeo and Screencast.com.

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.