If indeed a picture is worth a thousand words then perhaps a screencast is worth a million?  Your viewers get to see your application in action just as if you were giving a live demo (but without any annoying crashes or slow-downs!), they hear a friendly human voice and they get to see your tool solving their problem.  What could be more convincing?

In this series we’ll look at all the steps you need to take to make beautiful screencasts that explain your software to your users.  It is aimed at anyone selling software or web-applications who wants to increase their user-numbers and sales.

1. Why do you need to screencast?
2. Choosing your screencast software
3. Editing your screencast
4. Why adding music makes your screencast more professional
5. How and why export screencasts to .flv, .mp4, .wmv, .avi and .swf formats
6. Embedding screencasts in your site (not yet published)
7. Getting your screencast seen by more people using sites like YouTube and Vimeo (not yet published)
8. Pro tip – how to make your audio sound like it was recorded by a professional (not yet published)
9. Pro tip – using an introductory animation and PowerPoint slides (not yet published)

Our memories are keyed to different ways of perceiving sensations (called modalities or semiotics) – simply put, the more senses are involved, the more ways we have to remember something.  A site that uses video will be more memorable than one that just uses text and images as we’re adding full-motion video and audio to the usual text and images.

Smaller software companies typically have to work hard to get their message out – a screencast gives you a professional demo (so you punch above your weight) which quickly explains your proposition.

A 2 minute screencast can express pages of feature lists and screenshots.  By showing how your tool works the viewer can easily understand if it solves their problem – if it does then it makes sense to try you out rather than going back to Google to find a competitor.

Contrast this with the process of comparing feature lists between several different applications – you still don’t know which one will actually solve your issue to you keep researching until you think it is worth trying one.  Help your users avoid this process and keep them interested in your tool by using screencasts.

Ideal ways to use a screencast include:

• Adding one or more to your homepage to give ‘the big picture’ within 2 minutes e.g. LiveDrive
  
• Adding several to your main feature-tour pages to show each feature in action e.g. BackPack
• Adding screencasts through-out your site to introduce new features as the user comes across them

Do remember to use a voice-over, humans are keyed to respond to a friendly, helpful, confident voice – it puts us at ease and makes the screencast more watchable.  This does mean you’ll need a good voice and a decent microphone (more on this later in the series).

How to get started?

First, you must plan your screencast.  Know who you’re presenting to and what they need to learn, then figure out how explain your software in under 2 minutes.  Sketch out the scenes and make notes, then practice the demo a few times.  Remember that in post-production you can add call-outs and annotations, so background information can be added which you don’t need to narrate.

Next you’ll want to choose your screencasting software, then edit the screencast.  You’ll also want to add music to give it a professional feel and then you’ll have to figure out which formats to export.  Having decided on your format (probably .flv or .mp4) you’ll want to embed the screencast in your site and possibly consider spreading it further afield into sites like YouTube and Vimeo.

For further polish you’ll want to consider how you record your audio – what’s the best mic to use?  Why use an external mic over an internal one?  Finally, consider extra polish with an introductory animation (this really sets you apart from the crowd) and short slide sections.

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

Previously we’ve looked at choosing your screencasting software, editing the screencast and adding music, now let’s look at exporting the finished video.  Later we’ll consider embedding the screencast in your site and spreading it further afield into sites like YouTube and Vimeo.  We’ll finish with a discussion on narration recording and how to add extra polish.

In times gone past the choice of video format was rather murky for screencasts.  Now the choice is rather simple – .flv works well (but is old and produces large files), .mp4 isn’t quite well-accepted enough but will soon be the right choice (it produces much smaller files).

Previously we had to worry about which platform the viewer was on – .mov for Mac users, .wmv for Windows, maybe an old .avi for Linux.  Right now the smartest choice for maximum cross-platform viewership is .flv.  Almost all ProCasts screencasts are delivered as .flv.

According to our research approximately 98% of Internet users have Flash 7 or above (for .flv) and about 90% have Flash 9.0.115 (for .mp4). Only use .mp4 if you know that most of your audience have Flash 9.0.115 or above else you could lose 10% of your viewership.

In the upcoming Firefox 3.5 we’ll see in-browser support for the new <video> tag which enables us to embed any video type easily in a webpage.  This opens a new option as we could now use the open-source .ogg theora format (based loosely on the .flv-like Sorenson 3 codec).

Will Theora be a better choice?  Probably not (note – I am an open-source advocate!), it uses old technology (equivalent to Sorenson 3) and whilst we can make nice videos that are crisp (see our .ogg export at AdblockPlus.org) the files are large.  .ogg support is less widespread than .flv and the videos have equivalent visual quality.

If you are curious about Theora and you’d like to encourage more support for open-source codecs (particularly important if you’re dealing with the FOSS movement) then checkout ffmpeg2theora.

To convert your videos to .flv (or .mp4) you will see export options in all the regular screencasting tools like CamTasia and ScreenFlow.  ffmpeg 0.5 has is great if you like the command line (ffmpeg flv tutorial).  Quicktime Pro also has great exporting tools and there are a wide range of commercial tools that focus purely on exporting video.

Personally I use CamTasia, ScreenFlow and ffmpeg (open-source), feel free to leave a comment with alternate suggestions.

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

We’ve already looked at choosing your screencasting software and editing the screencast, now let’s look at adding music.  Later we’ll look at exporting the finished video, embedding the screencast in your site and spreading it further afield into sites like YouTube and Vimeo.  We’ll also cover narration recording and how to add extra polish.

Background music helps to give pace to your video – you can choose a fun and fast track for a homepage intro screencast and soothing, gentle music during longer tutorials.

Typically you buy a track (cost: $10USD – $50USD) and add it to your screencast using a screencast editor (e.g. CamTasia or ScreenFlow).  Generally we alter the volume envelope of the track before we add it to the screencast so it is louder at first, quiet during narration and fades out at the end.

Sites we’ve used for background music include LoopSound and StockMusic.net.  Browse through their catalogues and preview the tracks.  When you purchase a track generally you get a few days to download the .wav and/or .mp3 and then you have to keep it locally (the sites don’t store your purchase for long).

If your narration is problematic (e.g. you have background noise, coughs, street-noise, breathing) then you will find that a backing music track is a cheap fix.  It won’t remove the problems but it will hide them.

Note that we always suggest fixing your source recording.  Here at ProCasts we always record the voice-over separately, remove background noise, remove any artefacts and apply range compression and normalisation as a matter of course.  We’d never release a problematic audio track and you shouldn’t either!

Audacity is a great audio editor.  You can open the volume envelope tool to change the volume throughout the track, first cut the music to the precise length of your screencast and then start loud, fade down for narration, then fade out at the end.

This process is fiddly and will take multiple attempts but the results are well worth it!

For good examples of possible end results see our screencast examples page and watch the LiveDrive, Adblock Plus and BrandWatch examples.

An alternate approach to manually changing the volume on a music track is to use side-chaining:

Side-chaining uses the signal level of another input or an equalized version of the original input to control the compression level of the original signal.

The technique is known as ducking, when you speak your voice’s presence is used to lower the volume of the music track.  This means that the music track’s volume will raise and lower (which might sound odd in places) but the process is going to be simpler than manually adjusting the volume levels.  Thanks to Gasto for the tip.

What next?  Well, you’ll want to export your screencast in the right format for the widest possible distribution.

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

We’ve discussed why you should screencast, how to choose your screencast software and adding music in this screencast tutorial series, now we’ll look at editing your recording.

Your goal when editing is to create the shortest, snappiest and cleanest screencast that’s possible.  If it is fast-moving and interesting then your viewers will keep watching, if it is hard to watch, boring, slow or with rough audio then the viewer is likely to click away – you want to avoid this!

A nice clean audio track makes a slower screencast tolerable, even a nice snappy screencast is hard to watch if the audio is bad (i.e. noisy/hummy, clipped, full of coughs, horrid music, anything harsh on the ears).

To make your screencast easy to watch, the first thing you should do is edit out any slow sections (e.g. when a web-page is loading) and remove any errors (e.g. you wiggled the mouse around and then started that sequence again).

Once you’ve removed the dead wood, next you want to enhance the video.  Use zooms and highlights to focus the viewer’s attention exactly where you want it.    Zooms are especially useful if you’re recording a large resolution and presenting it much smaller – the final text might be hard to read so a zoom makes everything legible.

For software, I tend to recommend CamTasia on Windows – it is an excellent package with a lossless codec and a full screencast editor.  On a Mac I use ScreenFlow, it also has a great editor (I think not quite as powerful as CamTasia’s but I’m hoping to be proved wrong).  On a Mac you also have iMovie which gives you an extra box of tools.

If you’re on a budget on Windows and you’re using HyperCam or CamStudio, you can try VirtualDubMod.  VirtualDubMod is a bit of a pain to use but does let you cut sections out, even though you can’t use it to add zooms or text annotations.

Finally, consider making an intro title and an exit screen.  CamTasia makes this easy, you can also  create something in a graphics package – include your logo, a title and maybe a date (if your video gets old, the end-user has a chance to see that it is out of date!).

An animated introduction is nice – you can easily engage an animator on e.g. eLance to add a simple effect so you get a 4 second animated sequence.  It’ll really make your screencast stand out from the competition.

Next step – adding music to your screencast.

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

We’ve already covered why you should be screencasting, now let’s look at your software choices.  For each platform you have a choice of a few pieces of software.  Each of the choices will give you crystal-clear recordings so you have great raw-footage to edit down.

I’ll cover editing in the next of these screencast tutorial posts.  You really should put time aside to edit the recording down otherwise you have to take a perfect recording (and that’s hard!).

You can use desktop software or web-based tools, these are your main choices:

• CamTasia, commercial, to Windows Vista
• BBFlashBack, commercial, to Windows Vista
• CamStudio, open-source, to Windows XP
• HyperCam, shareware, to Windows Vista
• ScreenFlow, commercial, Mac OS X
• iShowU, commercial, Mac OS X
• Snapz Pro, commercial, Mac OS X
• RecordMyDesktop, open-source, Linux
• ScreenToaster, free, web-app (Win/Lin/Mac)
• ScreenCastle, free, web-app (Win/Lin/Mac)
• Jing, free with watermark and unwatermarked Pro version, web-app
• Screencast-0-matic, free, web-app
• More tools here

My preferred tool on Windows is CamTasia (all our commercial productions are recorded with it).  I’ve used HyperCam in the past, it is simple, cheap and stable.  CamStudio is equally as simple as HyperCam and comes with a free lossless codec, but the codec suffers from audio/video synch problems on some machines (all of mine!) and doesn’t work so well on XP.

TechSmith offer a First Walkthrough pdf (12 pages) on the fundamentals of making your first recording using CamTasia.  Even if you’re not using CT you should take a look, they highlight a lot of points that will probably help you out.

Both HyperCam and CamStudio lack an editor (see the next post) whereas CamTasia has everything built-in.

On a Mac I use ScreenFlow.  I’m told that iShowU and SnapzPro are each very good.

For Linux you have RecordMyDesktop, it exports .ogg vorbis files (which makes editing a pain as few editors work well with .ogg) but is a stable tool.  You might have to fight to get your mic to work, that’s a perennial problem with Linux annoyingly.

The three web-based tools are easy to use, they run straight from the browser.  I believe that they each lack an editor though it looks as though you can export a .mov or .avi from each for off-line editing.  I believe that Jing watermarks the videos (unless you buy Jing Pro) and that ScreenToaster and Screencast-o-matic are unmarked.

Next you’ll want to edit your screencast to remove glitches, cut down sections when things are loaded and generally make the screencast as snappy as possible.  After editing of course you’ll want to add music to improve the viewer’s perception of quality.

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

For the Adblock Plus video Wladimir wanted a freely licensed .ogv video to accompany the YouTube format.  At first I turned to my trusty ffmpeg but it seems that theora/vorbis output isn’t as good as it could be using ffmpeg.  [If you want tips on ffmpeg, see my earlier converting screencasts with ffmpeg post]

A good comment on the post Fast and reliable ways to encode Theora Ogg videos pointed me at ffmpeg2theora which Just Works.  I’m using v0.21 on Ubuntu, and v0.24 looks to be the most current, but v0.21 did the job fine.

At first I tried using the defaults:

ffmpeg2theora AdBlockPlus_iPhoneFinished.mov -o out.ogv

which converted the 35mb .mov to an 8mb .ogv but the video stream had some artefacts.  The audio stream was far superior compared to ffmpeg’s attempts.  To solve the video artefacts I asked it to use ‘quality level 8′ rather than the default 5:

ffmpeg2theora AdBlockPlus_iPhoneFinished.mov -v 8 -o out.ogv

and the 13mb output is great.  I also created a 10mb .m4v iPhone version so I can demo it when on the move.

Are you making your own screencasts?  Frustrated that they’re not generating the actions you want?  Here we present 8 tips borne of 4 years screencasting experience from teaching 100,000 users a month at ShowMeDo and explaining client’s products inside ProCasts.

1. Avoid built-in and 3.5mm (analogue) microphones – built-in and analogue mics introduce background hum.  Often built-in mics pick-up fans and the heavy thump of fingers on keys and mics with 3.5mm plugs introduce background hum which is hard to remove
2. Use a USB mic – digital microphone connections bypass the built-in analogue circuitry and so avoid the introduction of background noise, this makes your final audio sound much more professional.  More expensive mics and equipment give superior results.
3. Edit out the dull bits – nobody likes watching a spinning hourglass, wiggling mouse or slowly-painting window.  Use a video editor to remove all the deadwood, your viewers will thank you!
4. Know your audience – think about your audience and their needs.  What’s the shortest message you can give that covers most of their questions?
5. Have a plan – you’ve thought about your audience, now question what they need to know and how you’ll teach them.
6. Storyboard – sketch the scenes to clarify what you’re making.  First sketch what you want to achieve, then plan each scene.  We often sketch what we’ll see (especially for animations) and write comments telling us what is happening and what is being communicated
7. Use annotations to give supporting information – extra text on-screen in call-outs can give useful background information that’s secondary to the narration.  Plan them when story-boarding to help reduce the narration.
8. Keep it short – the shorter it is, the more will watch it.  30 seconds to 1 minute is easily watched, 5 minutes often feels like a chore.  Shorter is better, aim to get across 90% of the information in 1-2 minutes compared to 100% in 5 minutes and you’ll be on the right track.

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