We Need Your Help - Screencasting Tips for New Screencasters

If you are showing students how to do something on a campus system (e.g., Blackboard)... put your view into student mode, so your viewers will see the system from their perspective, and not yours.

The key thing I have found out is to make a few determinations before every making the first recording:

1) What is the final resolution of the video, if possible I place the software/screen in that resolution
2) Do I want to include mouse click cursors?
3) Is it better to make lots of small recordings and stitch/edit them together or make one long one.
4) Turn off Outlook and other unneeded programs, heck I even put the phones on "Do not disturb"
5) I keep a glass of water close by
6) A quick storyboard/outline will help with the process and cut down on ums and ahs. It doesn't have to be formal, but one needs to know what the purpose of the capture is

I made a screencast on this subject. It's not about technical issues but design and delivery considerations. See:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4_5lOKSVqw

Don't try to impress you viewers with how many transitions you can use. Just use the most appropriate one and stick to it (maybe vary just once to keep interest).
The reason for this of course is that viewers need to know where the next piece of information is coming from.
After all it's the delivery of information that's important - not how many surprises you can give them.

For beginners just getting acquainted with the screen recording software is enough to start with. Knowing how to record, pause, and play the screencast video is essential. Also being quite familiarized with the subject helps a lot, because if you need to consult documentation too often, it might take the screencast creation longer to finish.

But really what's more important is to finish a series of screencast videos, showing the completion of a task, and making the audience feel acomplished by following the screencast.

For intermediat to advanced screencasters, my best advice is to always learn new ways to engage the audience in the subject being treated. I think that creating small illustrations, diagrams and animations might enhance the learning experience, if done appropriately and not overdone. Mastering the voice, by making it recognizable in every screencast, and perhaps taking some voice-over lessons to understand the importance of speech in screencasts, the emotions and emphasis it conveys, helps a lot.

I would say that figuring out what size of file you want your screencast to be limited to is the #1 priority for people with slow or intermittent internet speed. As a teacher in Asia, large files are the bane of our existence as they can take forever (or not at all) to download. Knowing/understanding the lingo for file sizing is crucial.

Perhaps the first things (or one/two of them) is the value of Playlists and Blog Media Rolls. Once understood, these tools are extremely helpful.

some hard won experience:

* learning:
If you want to teach the students stuff, force your students to make screencast's instead to watch screenscasts.

* don't bore:
The same rules as for TV apply to screencasts: attention span of audience is guaranteed under 3 minutes for any given topic, Animals, children & pretty girls are interesting (in this order). Male nerds, empty screens and slow-moving mouse-pointers are boring. Use a webcam to show the speakers face.

* Screen resolution:
Depending on the video platform where you upload, video resolution will be 800x600 or even less. While recording, restrict your screen resolution to 1024x800 at maximum and use large fonts and icons. Don't use your super-wide screen resolution while recording or the audience will only see tiny pixels.

* Make Subtitles:
Even if you put lot of work into sound-post-production, there is a fat chance that the screencast audience will not hear much of the sound. (lacking audio system, no headphones, strong background noise, offices were you have to remain silent, big crowd (classroom) and no amplifier, no native-speaker etc.). Do the audience a favor and write subtitles for your screencast. Merge the subtitles with your screencast before uploading to a video platform.

* practise first
Singers, actors, comedians and politicans: they all are used to train several times before doing their public "speech". Veterans may need less daily training, but you can bet they once trained a lot. Ergo: do several practise runs before recording your screencast. If you work with students, prepare the students in advance that recording screencasts can take huge amount of time. Nobody cares how fast you recorded your screencast. Everyone cares if the screencast is good.

*include help documentation in screencast
If you try to teach anything in your screencast, it is wise to publish a help document (wiki page, tutorial page, text documents with instruction..) so that your audience is not forced to take notes while watching the screencast. Usually you will publish your help page together with the screencast. But: if your screencast is really good, it will spread among video platforms, and the link to your help document will be most likely vanish. Solution: Make the help document first and include the help document in your screencast (showing zoomed how to type in the URL of your help document, show how to use your own help document to figure out what is the next step etc). If you audience manages to access the same help document that you used in the screencast, the audience will recognize the help document from the video and have a very positive learning effect.

some of my videos, mostly made with students:

http://showmedo.com/videos/?author=71

crude post-production tips using linux:

http://wiki.showmedo.com/index.php/Video_editing_Ubuntu

Here are some basic production tips.

1) If you mess up and don't say something the way you want to. Just be silent for a second (keep recording) and repeat your self. Those periods of silence are easy to spot in the audio waveform when editing. Looking for the silence, helps you find the bad part to cut out.

2) Record lots of extra video with the mouse either in a fixed location or off the screen. You can use the extra video when editing to make smooth transitions between video that is cut out. Video where the mouse is moving should be in the middle of a scene. Deciding ahead of time on what to do with the mouse between scenes makes for easier editing.

3) Consider putting the audio narration in a separate tack, possibly recorded with just Audacity. This will lengthen the video editing task, but make a smoother video. The problem for me is that it is hard to do a good job of running the computer for the demonstration and talking at the same time.

4) Have a script. It helps cut out the "ums" and "ahs".

1)Script. In a multimedia presentation, premeditated visuals will not overcome meandering audio.

2) Don't reinvent the PowerPoint wheel. Save time by using templates [created according to your own design package or brand] and reusing animations. Copy 'n' paste from one into another; then tweak to fit.

3) Experiment. It's the only way to master CS6. Problems are good; because they challenge you to come up with solutions and work-arounds. More times than not, creatively using one of the other tracks will provide a solution.