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!).

Update – a longer list of screencast software is being maintained at TheScreencastingHandbook.

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

• CamTasia, commercial, to Windows Vista
• BBFlashBack, commercial, to Windows Vista
• BBFlashBack Express, free, 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.

BBFlashBack Express looks powerful but I’ve yet to try it – it is free and has an editor (if it is as good as the commercial version’s editor then it’ll be good indeed).

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.

ShowMeDo has a long learning path on learning to screencast which demonstrates many of the free tools with sets of screencasts.

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.

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.

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.

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?

For evidence for how screencasts can double sign-ups, increase sales, reduce your bounce-rate (by 7%) and halve your support costs, see our 4 mini case studies.

STOP – become a better screencaster!

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
7. Get more publicity with sites like YouTube and Vimeo
8. Pro tip – how to make your audio sound like it was recorded by a professional
9. Pro tip – using an introductory animation and PowerPoint slides

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 e.g. FreshBooks

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.

Re-posts – Rudy at ScreenToaster has reposted the above for all their users, thanks Rudy!

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.

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