Tips for recording a Screencast

Silence is Golden, but you can't hear gold

You're going through a thought process when you work on an image, perhapps you've been doing this for so long you don't even have to think about it. Your viewers might not be so lucky! Try to explain what you're up to as you do it. Why did you select that filter? Why didn't you use the other tool? Walk them through it. If on the other hand you've done some work to speed up your video and would like it to be enjoyed, consider adding some royalty free music as a background

Length

Short is better than long. Rather than creating one very long video demonstrating everything you would like to do, consider creating a few, demonstrating different techniques. The ability to relate them to each other should be along shortly.

Audio

The audiance would like to hear you, not the television, not your mom yelling at you about dinner, not your clothing sounds, and while it may be you technically, not your heavy breathing. USB microphones are getting pretty cheap, they work much better than the ones built into laptops, or webcams

Software

Mac

I've had great luck with iShowU. After recording the video the files tend to be rather large (500MB-1.5GB) which is huge, and far beyond any sensible size to be uploading to a form on a web page. Re-Encoding with iMovie seems to work quite well (Share->Export with Quick Time, choose to re-encode to 800x600 or 640x480, medium quality or there abouts). After the re-encode the videos tend to be of a sane size for uploading.

There's another great product called Jing, that makes recording quite easy. Tragically you need Jing Pro in order to record into the apropriate format (use H.264). It's only $14.95, but it does make recording videos a one step process (no need to re-encode with iMovie, the videos it makes are small enough!).

Windows

Camtasia Studio is pretty awesome

Linux

We're open to suggestions

Recording Area

Videos will be re-encoded into 4:3 aspect ratio, at 640x480 (800x600 comming soon?), so keep that in mind when you're recording video. You'll want to record in a similar ratio in order to ensure that the video doesn't get all squished and ugly later on.

Recording Formats

You're welcome to record in either AVI, MOV, or MP4. Our software will automagically encode those into nifty .flv files.

Distracting Screens

Try closing your other applications before you start recording, if possible use a white or other mono-colour desktop to avoid distractions

Rehearse, but don't script

Going through what you want to say ahead of time, and deciding what you want to do with the photo is great. Writing down exactly what word you want to use will make your presentation sound forced

Mistakes are Educational

There's a lot to be learned from what you do with a photo, but there's just as much to learn from what you didn't do. If you're recording and something turns out poorly don't stop or edit that bit out. Explain (to the best of your ability) what wen't wrong, undo the action, and try something else. Watching mistakes happen exposes a tremendous amount of your thought process, it's far too valuble to pass up.