This means that if you solely use .mp4 to present screencasts to the world, you’re missing out on 10% of your viewership because they won’t be able to view mp4 content (they can view .flv content just fine though).  The critical version number is 9.0.115 – if their Flash version is 9.0.115 or above then they can view .mp4 videos.

As before I’ve used three sites that I have control over – ShowMeDo with a large, international audience, my own blog and the main ProCasts site.

The monthly visitor counts are:

• ShowMeDo.com 100,000 (4 years+)
• IanOzsvald.com 1,800 (4 years+)
• ProCasts.co.uk 2,300 (1 year)

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

• ShowMeDo.com 93% (it was 86% back in January)
• IanOzsvald.com 86% (it was 84% back in January)
• ProCasts.co.uk 93% (it was 96% back in January – but this was from a smaller data set that was more likely to show a big variance in monthly figures)

Across the three sites the average number of players that have version numbers definitely below 9.0.115 were 1.75%.  The number inbetween (approximately 7.5%) didn’t reliably report their version number – either these were not real Flash players or they may have been very old versions.

As I stated before – if you’re thinking of just using .mp4 videos to show your screencasts then you risk losing 10% of your potential viewership.  If all your viewers are on the Mac or iPhone then it might make sense to go with .mp4 but otherwise I’d suggest either staying with .flv (that’s what we do in ProCasts) or using a player than can support both file types.

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.

Andy White of Wire World Media interviewed me for the Internet Marketing Podcast episode 48 Ink, Paper and Screencasts a couple of weeks back, we’re the last 12 minutes of the hour-long marketing podcast.

Topics covered include how screencasts convince more first-time visitors to try a product, how screencasts reduce support-costs by letting the viewer solve their own issue and how to get started using free and commercial software.  Also discussed is my plan to start revealing the positive statistics of using screencasts on conversions from A/B tests.

This podcast is listed with others and useful articles in our screencast interviews post.

Full transcript:

Andy:  So here we are on a rather windy day outside in Pavilion Gardens in Brighton, and I am sitting with Ian Ozsvald.

Ian:  Hello Andy.

Andy:  Hello there.  Now Ian, let’s just do a little bit of transparency at the front.  Ian does own a business called ShowMeDo, is that correct Ian?

Ian:    Yes, co-founder in the business, ShowMeDo, and I run a screencasting company called Procasts.

Andy:  And Procasts do screencasts for people, screencasts being ?

Ian:    A screencast is a video showing software in action.  It can show a web app or desktop software running in a video.  If you go the Apple site and you see their videos, those are screencasts.

Andy:  Brilliant.  So, what we want to talk about today in this brief interview is the reason why doing a screencast to promote your business or your product is a good idea.

Ian:    Thanks Andy.

I run a screencasting company and I’ve got a big thing about education.  I love teaching people how products and how skills work.  So, what I want to do in this interview is explain to you why you should be using screencasts in your Website.

Now, a screencast is a demo of software.  You have a 2 or 3-minute video showing the software in action.  This means that your first-time web visitor who’s never seen your product before, rather than forcing them to wade through screens of pictures and text trying to figure out if your product does what they need, instead they see it in action.  They get a nice, comfortable voice walking them through the product, they see it solving the problem that they’ve got, and at the end of it, they know whether your solution solves their problem.  And if it does, fabulous, they can get involved.

Andy:  Now, I’m guessing that this type of approach is particularly good for people whose product is actually software.  Would that be right?

Ian:  Absolutely.  If you’ve got a desktop software product on any platform, or if you’ve got a web application, then this is ideally suited for you.  Of course, if you’ve got a real-world product, you’ve got a physical product somebody uses in their hands, then you can’t use screencasting.  You’re going to need to use a real-world video, and we see that advertised on the tellie all the time, so we know that technique works.

But with software products, pretty much nobody is exploiting the technique of screencasting, except perhaps for Google and Apple and I’m really pushing for everyone to get involved with screencasting and try it out.  You can get started with paying no money at all, and the results really can be quite dramatic.

Andy:  Now, how does somebody, perhaps who is not technical, Ian, make a screencast?

Ian:  Now, a couple of years ago, you would have to download a piece of software to your machine, and it was software for Windows and for Mac machine.  You would install and you would run it, and it would capture the entire screen and the audio feed coming in from a microphone.  So, it’s a bit like using an editing piece of software on your PC.  You have to have some savvy using video editing software.  It would record your screen.  You would have scripted your presentation beforehand.  You’re going to run through your presentation, showing your user ñ just like having a demo with a friend sitting next to you, showing them what’s going on, clicking around, and at the end of it, you’ve got a nice video, which can you put onto the web.

Now, in the last six months, there’s been some interesting developments.  Three companies are now offering free web-based softwares.  One of them is Jing by Techsmith.  Another one is Screen Toaster.  And, the third one is Screencaster.

Each of these, they’re free services.  You go to their Website, you say “start recording,” it downloads a small applet, and it just starts recording your desktop and the audio feed from your microphone.  So, you can get started with no money at all.

Andy:  Now, I’ve heard of Screen Toaster.  Do they all work in pretty much the same way; basically, you download a small, sort of, client that runs on your machine, and then it uploads it to the mother ship, as it were?

Ian:  Absolutely.  From what I remember, with Jing you download an applet, which you install on your machine, then that runs locally.  So, every time you use a new machine, you have to install this bit of software.  Screen Toaster and Screencaster, they’re using a Java applet inside the browser, so you just click “record” and it just download what it needs.  You haven’t got to install anything, and it just starts recording off the bat.

Andy:  And do you get a chance to edit if you make a mistake, or do you have to redo it from the beginning?

Ian:  That’s the interesting thing, showing the immaturity at the moment of the online recording software.  With the online tools, you can’t edit your video.  You have to download what you’ve recorded and edit it offline, so on a Mac using iMovie perhaps, and on Windows, using one of the many editing tools.

But, if you’re using the desktop-based software like Camtasia on Windows and ScreenFlow on a Mac, they always come with an editor built in, so you can do all your editing there after you’ve recorded your video.

Andy:  Brilliant.  Now on your site, on Procasts, your exposing some steps, aren’t you, that show how effective having a screencast is?

Ian:  Well actually, what I’m intending to do is show the stats from ShowMeDo, because I am a co-founder of that site.  I’ve worked with clients and demonstrated some pretty interesting numbers.  For one of the clients, we’ve double his sign-up rate just by putting a video on the front page, and for another client, we decreased their support emails by 25%, and basically freed up one day of a guy’s time per week by making him not go through the same steps on a support query.  So these are pretty good numbers.

But, because their stats are private, I can’t expose those.  And really, to fulfill my aims of education, I want to expose real good, analytic data, and so I’m doing an experiment with ShowMeDo at the moment where I’m using videos on the sales page to increase the conversion rate, and I’m recording the stats.  I’ll be exposing those stats in their raw form on my blog, and then going through a number of A/V tests trying out different video styles, presentations, different ways of including the video, all to demonstrate exactly the right ways to increase your conversation rates using screencasts.

Andy:  So, where do people need to go to look at your blog, Ian?

Ian:  You need to come to my blog.  That’s blog.procasts.co.uk.

Andy:  Now, do you have any tips for people that are just about to embark on doing some screencasting, do’s and don’ts, Ian?

Ian:  Absolutely.  One of the first things you should do is think about who your audience is, first of all.  You want to isolate one group of people that you’re presenting to, and then you want to craft a script up front.  If you sit down and you just blather away for 10 minutes trying to come up with things on the fly, you’re going to have lots of um’s and er’s and gaps, and the video’s not going to be very well targeted.  No one’s really going to want to watch it.

But, if you know who you’re presenting to, what you’re teaching them, and you keep your script to 2 to 3 minutes (I always try and aim for 2 minutes), then you’ve got a really snappy, nice presentation, you’ll get your message across, and 80% of the viewers then will understand what you’re trying to explain and they’ll move on straight away.

If you go and start with the online free software, like Screen Toaster, then you can get up and running without paying any money, and you can just experiment for free.

Andy:  Do things like Screen Toaster make it easy to embed the video on your site?

Ian:  With Screen Toaster, you get a download link and they embed the video in their site, and I believe you can embed that video into your site.  Certainly, you can upload to YouTube, and you get some analytics out of that for free, and then you just take the video and you embed it into your site.  Alternatively, and I’m including this in my screencasting tutorial that I’m running on the blog at the moment, you can download the video, put it into your own site,  (6:55 unintelligible) based, and then using free JavaScript tools, embed that video; no adverts, no YouTube related video links, just your video in your site and play it to your users.

Andy:  You touched on something really interesting there, because when I first started this conversation with you, I was thinking, “Oh crikey, yes, this would be really good for people that perhaps have some software that they’ve developed, or maybe they’re a consultant and they want to show people how to do basic stuff.”  But, you mentioned support, and I had forgotten completely about support.  I mean, commonly asked questions; how do you do ABC where ABC’s a very commonly asked thing.

Andy:  Absolutely, yes.  One of my clients here in Brighton, they came to me and said that one of their guys was basically losing a day a week answering a query for users to their subscription service.  How did they stop paying every month?  And, they would be a bit confused about the process.  Commonly, they weren’t terribly web savvy user, they needed handholding, they wanted reassurance that they weren’t going to get their credit card cancelled by going through the cancellation process, so they kept on phoning up and sending in emails.

So, I created a video, just a very slow, well-paced video, 5 minutes long, going through all of the steps, lots of reassurance, and then overnight, this chap stop receiving support requests, and one day a week was freed up.  So, that’s a fantastic way just to stop spending your time and money repeating the same questions and answering them, and instead, get on with developing your product.

Andy:  So Ian, thanks so much for talking to us.

Now of course, your Website for the Procasts is

Ian:  Procasts.co.uk.

Andy:  And if anybody wants to, then obviously, go visit us.

Ian, what are your plans for the next few weeks?  I know you’ve got some requests, haven’t you?

Ian:  My big plan is to run a campaign to help everyone get a screencast into every Website.  I really want to see more people adopting the technique of screencasting.  So, once I finish the 9-part tutorial – I’ve got a few episodes to publish in the next few weeks – once that’s finished, I’ll be publishing a new series on the blog discussing how to get a screencast into your Website, why you need it, and how it will increase your conversations, and everything you need to do to get those screencasts in there.

Andy:  Well, some great tips there.

Ian Ozsvald of Procasts.co.uk, thank you very, very much indeed.

Ian:  Thanks very much Andy.

“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.

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.

Note - The Screencasting Handbook covers this and lots more if you’re making your own screencasts, come and take a look.

Topics covered include:

• Removing background noise (you can do this for all the audio or just sections)
• Silencing periods with breathing and lip-smack noises
• Fading in and out to cover-up harsh cuts
• Dynamic range compression
• Normalisation
• De-essing using the volume control

I also discuss a way of positioning your mic to reduce the chance of recording strong sibilants and tell you how to get better control over aligning your audio with video actions.

The audio clip used is from my ie6update introduction screencast of yesterday.

Take a look here:

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.

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.

Next – learn how to embed the screencast into your own website using tools like the JW FLV Media Player and FlowPlayer.

Do you want more of your visitors to use your software? 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.

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.  We use a backing track in this introduction to the AdblockPlus Firefox extension, it is a part of the reason we’ve got over 60 five-star ratings.  It keeps the screencast moving along at a nice pace and makes it stand out above the other AdblockPlus videos that are in YouTube:

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.

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.

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!  I’ve included two example screencasts for you below.

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.

See this screencast that Introduces Django in Under 1 Minute for a snappy video with great audio, music, several scenes and an opening title:

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!).

For the second example see Audio Editing using Audacity – this is a much longer tutorial video (5 minutes) with all the dead wood cut out (the original footage is closer to 12 minutes), along with an opening title and and a closing title with date, license and software versions:

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.

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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.