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

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

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

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

Why do visitors like screencasts?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He kindly adds:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The flags are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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