I even read a forum post about a year ago by a fellow screencaster who was concerned about this, wondering how professional screencasters are supposed to compete with a-few-clicks-and-done.

I don’t blame a beginning screencaster only just embarking on his career to be concerned about being replaced by a robot, but I do get exasperated at clients who fall into this trap.

They see Animoto vids, and they hear the pulse-pounding techno soundtrack, and take in the sexy, rapidfire, almost seizure-inducing visuals. Then they contact me saying “Oooh! We want that!”

Well, no you don’t. Dummy.

Another screencaster acquaintance of mine, Lon Naylor, has this motto that he puts on his site that’s a take-off on the old “Friends don’t let friends drink and drive” ad campaign, but he says “Friends don’t let friends make crappy videos.” Which is engaging and cute, but I think most clients (and even most providers) fall short of really considering what truly makes for a crappy video.

When you ask most people, they immediately zero in on the technical. Bad audio, fuzzy visuals, no niceties like callouts and zooms and captioning. And all those things are certainly considerations, but they don’t make or break a screencast.

My definition of a crappy screencast is a lot simpler. It’s a video that does not do the  job you commissioned it to do. Training videos that are not pedagogically sound, that do not adhere to a set of basic established principles of educational multimedia, and how people best learn with multimedia. Marketing videos without a rock-solid unique selling proposition. That are essentially a dry list of features rather than a solid hook at the beginning, followed by a series of tangible, real world benefits. Knocking out the common objections and guiding the viewer ever so gently toward the sale, culminating in a call-to-action, a dynamite offer that leaves ‘em smacking their forheads and reaching for their wallets.

Animoto and their ilk can’t give you this. Neither can a human screencaster who only brings to the table a rudimentary technical knowledge of making screencasts.

Makes of screencasting software, like TechSmith and Telestream, sell people this notion that anybody can make a screencast, and from a technical perspective, that’s true. But unless you have didactic or persuasive abilities to go along with that, you’ll be relegated to making ineffective screencasts, and they won’t get any better at their jobs regardless of how much you pretty them up.

When people ask what I do for a living, I always say “professional screencaster,” and then prepare for the inevitable confused looks. But I’m realizing that it’s not entirely accurate, that maybe I’ve positioning myself wrong all this time. That I’m not a “screencaster” with a capital S. I’m a trainer. I’m a copywriter and a marketer. And I happen to “work in” screencasting the way a painter works in oils or watercolor.

There are going to be those clients who already have those elements figured out (or at least think they do), but even if you really do know what you’re doing, it’s always beneficial to get an outside set of eyes on it. Sometimes you’re too close to a project and its product to see the forest for the trees. These folks will potentially get turned off by this value-add, and the corresponding bump in price that comes with it. But that’s fine. Because those projects where I’m expected to be a “multimedia monkey” whose exclusive focus is on the technology aren’t interesting to me, anyway. I like to get my hands dirty with higher-level thinking.

So you get good at this other stuff, and establish a core baseline of competence. The next level, which I’m only just get intro, is where things get really exciting.

And it’s an exciting time to be in screencasting. The future of the screencasting industry in my opinion lies in the quantative, lies in measuring your success. Now web metrics is a discipline that has been around for years, and it’s now just starting to come into its own on the video side. And it’s actually even more interesting (read: useful) than general web metrics. For example, with a piece of web copy, you don’t really have a way to knowing what the user was reading when they bought, or when they bailed. But because video is comparatively much more linear, it’s easy to know, down to the second, the exact moment when the user got turned on (or off). That’s incredibly powerful information.

Something I’ve been playing around with is this notion of “iterative screencasting,” where you’re making incremental improvements to a screencast, and even split testing its effectiveness against earlier videos. Now, this is obviously more feasible for marketing videos than for training. But it’s often amazing how little changes can make a big difference, not just for the screencast in itself, but as a part in your overall sales funnel.

Do YOU measure your results? Sound off here, and let us know what software and systems you use.

A little while back, I let you in on my most trusted sources for procuring clip art and other stock imagery. Some of you were kind enough to leave a few comments with tips of your own. Today we shift to the audio side of the equation. It’s possible that you want to kick up the professionalism of your video by a notch or two. Or maybe you just want to break up the crushing monotony of your own voice droning on for minutes on end. Background music can be just the ticket.

You’ve got an ocean of possibilities here. Perhaps you want music throughout, or perhaps just a stinger and a tag (music only during the intro & outro segments). Do you want a frenetic, high-energy piece, or something subtle and laid back? I get a lot of students (& clients) asking me about where I find my music.

Unlike my image collection process, where I use an eclectic range of sources, I’ve got ONE source for my audio. Uno. Eins. I have only one source for only one reason. I’ve never had cause to look elsewhere.

The quality is choice. The cost is reasonable. And there are some serious time-saving and mood-enhancing advantages you simply can’t get anywhere else. I’ll explain.

Background Music with SmartSound

For my money, there’s no better music source than SmartSound.com for screencast background music. They’ve got thousands of high-quality, royalty-free tracks on offer that you can buy and use however you like. These tracks can be picked up individually, or with other thematically-related tracks on albums. While appealing, this isn’t a significant departure thus far from any of the other major music sources out there. Where SmartSound really shines is in the way its musical library is structured. Most of its musical works are coded in a multi-layered, highly customizable format. This format is designed to work with its propriety Sonicfire Pro software. This offers the following advantages over standard musical libraries:

• Your musical selection can be set to any length. This alone is worth the cost of admission. Most libraries offer a particular selection in several lengths, usually something like 0:30, 1:00, and 3:00. This often means that you have to meticulously cut several versions together to get the piece to exact length you need, which is incredibly time-consuming. And unless you’re a pretty skillful editor, this Frankenmusic simply won’t sound right. But with SmartSound, you just drag the piece out the desired length, and the score is automatically rewritten to correspond to that length. No more weird cuts. No more fading music in and out to cover up the fact that your chosen piece was too long. I can’t tell you how much time this has saved me.
• Instruments can be individually turned on or off. You can customize sections of your score with different collections of instruments. Want to do a musical segue that only features percussion? With SmartSound, you can.
• Each track comes with multiple “moods.” Every musical piece features several moods, and you can specifically time these to synchronize with what’s happening your video. For example, if your screencast has a money shot, a special “ta-da!!!” moment that you really want to stress, you can crank up the mood to correspond to it. Now, the background music isn’t just “playing in the background.” It’s an active, accurate reflection of what the viewer is watching. It’s as if a Hollywood composer custom-wrote your score. You can even add “hits” at specific points (such as a cymbal crash) to drive a particular point home.

And for all this, the cost is pretty reasonable. Individual tracks start around $30-40, and full albums (usually around ten tracks or so) are usually $99. But they run special deals all the time, and they also offer some pretty radical volume deals that can make purchasing in bulk a real money-saver. The SonicFire Pro software costs $100, but it does include the Core Foundations starter album. Also,  if you pick up a five-album music pack (any 5 albums you choose) for $250, they’ll throw in the software for free. If you want to go whole hog, you spend $450 and get 20 albums, with a whole year to pick out the exact ones you want.

Finally, as an alternative to using the SonicFire software, they sell special plugins that give you all the SmartSound functionality right within non-linear editors, like Premiere, After Effects, Final Cut, and Avid. Man, what a boon it would be to my workflow if I had access to this toolset from within Camtasia Studio’s timeline (you listening, TechSmith?).

For the record, I should state that I have no affiliate relationship with SmartSound, and do not stand to benefit financially or otherwise by plugging their toolset. I’m just a very satisfied customer.

What do you think, Screencasters? Have you tried out the SmartSound system yet? Sound off on your experiences in the comments section below. Likewise, if you use another system you really love, let us know about it…

The application ain’t free, but once you own Camtasia Studio (and you should), the media assets are.

2. Microsoft Clip Art. You’re probably already familiar with this library via the Clip Art widget from within PowerPoint. But there’s also a searchable web-based front end for the library here:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/

 This is a free resource. I don’t even think you have to own any Microsoft products.

3. Stock.XCHNG. This is a web site where photographers and designers make their creations available for others to use. There’s a lot of free, high-quality stuff on here, and it’s one of the places I go first. One caveat is to carefully review the licensing conditions of the images you want to use. While the pics are always free to use, some authors want you to notify them in advance (or even ask permission), while others may wish to be credited for the image with some kind of byline in your screencast.

http://www.sxc.hu

4. Callouts.com. This is a newer service created by my friend Peter Gillberg over at softwarecasa.com. He’s launched a dynamite subscription-based service with hundreds of animated backgrounds and other callout graphics that you can download and use on an unlimited, royalty-free basis.

Summer of Miracles

I don’t often talk about my personal life on the dappertext list and site, but I felt somehow compelled to open up to you about something. I want to tell you about my summer.

The incredibly handsome young man over here on the right is my son Rubén. He just turned ten. At a year and a half, he was diagnosed with moderate to severe autism. Of course, we knew before anyone in a white coat ever confirmed it. As a baby, Rubén was a beautiful, smiley boy who flirted with strangers and sought your attention. At around a year of age, however, the smiles began to fade. People became like furniture to him, mere obstacles in his path. The couple of words he possessed disappeared, and wouldn’t return for some time.

I’ll never forget the endless nights I spent lying awake and silently mourning the boy I thought would be lost to me forever. After bringing him back to the U.S. for treatment, we got the official diagnosis, and it became real. At that point, we made the conscious decision to stow our self-pity, and to get busy.

Thus began a parade of speech therapists, diets, vitamins, probiotics, and various other interventions, both therapeutic and biomedical. It hasn’t been easy. My son is also what is known in the world of autism intervention as a “tough nut.” Some kids, with the right interventions, can glide right off the spectrum in a matter of months. For us, it’s been a grueling inch-by-inch battle, complete with occasional scary regressions, mystery rashes, intermittent sensory problems, and chronic “gut issues” (I won’t gross you out with the details on that one).

As you can probably imagine, this takes quite a toll, not only your mental and spiritual energy, but also on your pocketbook. By just about anyone’s standard’s (except maybe Donald Trump’s), dappertext LLC does reasonably well for a one-person company. But that doesn’t keep me from feeling the burn when these various interventions cost upwards of $25K per year. Luxuries like vacations, nicer cars, fine clothes, etc., have had to go by the wayside. Still we dreamt of bringing in better income, not so we could afford the cars and clothes, but so we could afford to do more for Rubén. Anything to make him better.

In the spring of this year, I managed to sign a couple of lucrative new clients, enabling us to finally make the big push we had always dreamed of. Our first stop was Boston, where we had him scoped from top to bottom by one of the world’s leading pediatric gastroenterologists. Then it was down to Florida, visiting his biomedical autism doc for six weeks. First there were more tests, followed by some targeted, aggressive interventions. I won’t disclose details about these, as I don’t want to give the remotest perception that I’m doling out medical advice to anyone. But suffice to say that these interventions were indicated by either clinical observation, his personal lab results, or both.

The result for this tough nut has been remarkable. A flurry of little improvements which, taken collectively, add up to A LOT. Worth every penny we spent, and more. To wit:

• Better speech. He now says longer sentences, and constructs them less laboriously.
• Better (more emotive) inflections in his speech. The flat, monotone affect so common among spectrum kids is now reduced.
• Lovely pretend play (also a major problem with spectrum children), using his stuffed animals to put on puppet shows.
• He’s increasingly seeking out play and interaction with me and his mother, and appropriately answering questions.

I know these seem like very small things, especially for those with neurotypical kids. But for us they’re HUGE. It gives me confidence that even an older spectrum child can still progress.

So why am I telling you all this? For two reasons. For one, I’m a proud pappy who wants to shout my son’s accomplishments from the rooftops, particularly in light of the light of the fact that there hasn’t been anything much to shout about in some time.

I’m also telling you because I’m getting an increasing number of calls and e-mails (most very diplomatically worded — a couple of them, not so much) inquiring as to the status of the Camtasia Studio 8: The Definitive Guide. Because this trip was largely an impromptu one, it required shifting my schedule around, and the book would therefore be seeing release significantly later than what I had been telling people. And I guess I just felt you were owed a more detailed explanation than the usual family issues blah blah personal time blahbitty blah. Please believe that I’m looking forward to its release every bit as much as you are. I very rarely say this about an emergent business issue, but I simply had more important things to take care of this summer.  :-)

Rest assured that it is still on track on for release in the near future. Part of the hold-up has been moving the whole thing to a newer, more stable authoring platform (specifically InDesign). The book will now release as an industry-standard interactive PDF. No more proprietary viewers, no more text that doesn’t scale (a big complaint among my senior audience), and no more cross-platform issues. I think you’ll be pleased. As always, Screencaster subscribers will be immediately alerted when I release it into the wild. 

“His in-classroom training was invaluable… Thanks to Daniel, two years later, we’re editing like pros. All thanks to Daniel Park.”

- Matt Wohl, Marketing Manager for Log On to Learn, an on-demand library of software tutorial videos.

A funny thing happened when I sent the offer of our Camtasia Studio 8 Boot Camp out into the wild. In addition to an enthusiastic response from Camtasia newbs, it garnered the attention of several people who already know Camtasia Studio pretty well, but who wanted to know it like I do . They wanted to train up on special topics like equipment, third-party software, hosting, best workflow practices, recording the best possible audio, even the basics of running a consultancy. They asked to join the course.

I initially said, “the more the merrier,” but then started to get a little nervous about putting these folks in the same room with a bunch of screencasting greenhorns.

Three tips that will help you hang onto your job,
even in a crappy economy.

At the end of last week, the U.S. economy hit an uncomfortable milestone. Starting in 1970, states have been able to offer extended benefits for the long-term unemployed when times were tough. But from this Monday onward, no state in the union will continue offering extended unemployment benefits. This means that over half a million jobless (511,000, to be more precise) just lost their benefits. You’d think that the removal of this crutch is the sign of a strengthening economy. Yet the national unemployment still lingers at a painfully high 8.3%, the housing market remains sluggish, and belts continue to tighten across the board.

It’s a rough time to be out of a job.

Having trained thousands of screencasters between my books and my live training events, I occasionally get updates from my more enthusiastic pupils about what they’re currently up to, and how they’ve managed to leverage what they’ve learned. In listening to their various war stories, I’ve noticed a few trends. I’d like to share those with you.

1. Companies value workers who can save them time, money, or human resources.

You know, the real beauty of screencasting as a discipline is that it’s so easy to financially justify. Building up a library of tutorial videos lets you front-load the investment of time and money into something you can use again and again. No longer does an HR rep have to consume their mornings teaching people how to fill out a time off request form. Menial training tasks get off-loaded to a video library, where they’re available any time, anywhere, and get taught will 100% consistency. Not only does this mean that key staffers can concentrate on more important things, it also means that the organization can by with fewer people. But you can bet that the builders of that library won’t be among them. Historically, when the business economy got rough, the training staff was often the first to go. This no longer appears to be the case, at least for those who can automatize their training.

You might wonder if a particularly industrious screencaster might not end up capturing their way out of a job, once everything’s been documented. From my experience, this fear is unfounded. Business needs are constantly in flux, and there’s always more to learn (and therefore, to teach).

2. Companies value workers who make them money (and can PROVE it).

A couple of years ago, Forbes magazine interviewed a bunch of mid- to high-level executives about how they get their information online. Three quarters (75%) said they watched work-related videos at least once weekly. 65% had visited a vendor’s web site after watching a video. More than half of younger executives say that they’ve made a business-related purchase right after watching a video.

And perhaps most compelling of all, 59% said if text and video were available on the same page, they prefer to watch the video. This obviously bodes well for those who make screencasts for sales and marketing.

But an oft-ignored component in the equation is measurement of success. Marketing is a helluva lot more scientific than it used to be. It’s now possible for a screencaster, through split-testing and web metrics, to know just HOW successful their video has been. I cannot stress enough to you the importance of measuring your results, for one simple reason.

No company in their right mind is going to fire you if you can actually show that you made them 10x your annual salary last year.

I may even end up teaching a special workshop just about this. Drop a comment if you think that would be valuable for you.

3. Companies value workers who show professional initiative.

Everyone loves a go-getter. Especially cash-strapped companies. When revenues beging to sink, they start looking for deadwood to trim. If you can demonstrate both the ability and the willingness to wear many hats and continue your professional development, you’ll easily outlast the lazy and uninformed.

I should know. I’ve been a self-employed screencasting professional for nearly a decade, and I’ve never been out of a job.

In September, I’m holding a special two-day Boot Camp for Camtasia Studio 8. It’s going to be a generous mix of technical detail, workflow tips, and industry know-how. I’d love to see you there.

In addition to the course itself, with your tuition you’ll get a free copy of Camtasia Studio 8: The Definitive Guide as well as a coupon for a free 30-minute consultation with yours truly to clear up any post-workshop questions and concerns.

And as someone who loves the Windy City, I can tell you that September is one damn fine month to be strolling down Chicago’s Miracle Mile.

Please join us, and MAKE YOURSELF IRREPLACEABLE.

All skill levels are welcome. More advanced users are encouraged to bring ideas and assets for their own real-world projects.

To your continued success, d.

p.s. Has screencasting saved your job? Tell us about it!

How to pick screencast topics that ease your workload,
simplify your life, and let you focus on more important things.

Not long ago, I had a client project with Monterey Peninsula College out in California. MPC had just received a grant to promote their cooperative work experience education program (or COOP), and their idea of building a promotional video series landed the ball squarely in my court.

My contact was Kathleen Clark. Kathleen had a problem. As the sole faculty member in the entire program, she was forced to wear an unbelievable number of hats. She had the long-term strategic task of growing the program, but at the same time, was saddled with the tactical day-to-day hustle of  recruiting both students and potential employers.

This split focus was naturally frustrating. When you’re responsible for both short- and long-term goals, it’s easy to get the nagging sense that you aren’t really doing either side justice. Perhaps you can relate.

MPC’s initial idea for me was to produce a few co-promotional pieces featuring some of their employers in specific industries (graphic arts, automotive tech, etc.) and their role in the program. A solid enough idea, albeit with a few potential flaws:

• By focusing on the most popular industries (and thereby the neglecting the less popular ones), they were potentially limiting the long-term growth of their program. By its very nature, this approach excludes those in newer industries who might never have thought of offering a COOP experience.
• Even within a particular industry, you worry about whether your audience will generalize the message. For example, if an employer views the successes of someone else’s program, there’s almost a natural inclination to say, “Well, yes, that worked for them, but our situation is different because blah blah blah…”
• For co-promotions to be a success, the partnering employer or industry needs to be as enthusiastic and dedicated to the task as you are.

After several false starts, Kathleen finally said to me, “You know what? Let’s scrap the current plan. I want to do something that makes my life easier.”  Good plan. We went back to the drawing board to pick a better set of screencast topics.

A bit part of Kathleen’s job was sitting down with students and employers to explain the benefits of the program. She eventually clued into the fact that there just weren’t enough hours in the day, and compiled a narrated PowerPoint presentation to walk students through the finer points of the program. I viewed it once, both to become familiar with the content and as a point of curiosity, just to see what I was replacing.

Longest twenty minutes of my life.

Okay, perhaps that’s an exaggeration. But it was a wordy, overly long meander which, while giving all the pertinent technical details, failed to front-load the material with tangible, real-world benefits. Y’know, the kind of thing that gets people psyched to find out more. Plus, the visual curb appeal was virtually non-existent. The presentation was an endless sea of bullet points.

In the end, we cut out the clutter, put the program’s Unique Selling Proposition front and center, and sexed it up with animations and great stock imagery. Take a look here:

Here’s what Kathleen had to say about the experience:

“In a nutshell” the videos Daniel produced are allowing me to get specific messages to target audiences.  The feedback I have received from students and employers has been fantastic.  My favorite comment was from a student with whom I spent a great deal of time before sending the link to my “Introduction to COOP” video.  He said, “You really didn’t need to spend all that time with me.  The video answered all the questions I had about your class.” 

In short, we figured out a few sweet-spot topics that helped to free up an appreciable bit of Kathleen’s day. And this is only one of four thoroughly kick-booty promotional pieces we did for MPC. Kathleen no longer needs to lose so much breath explaining every intricacy of the program to students and employers. She’s got an automated 24/7 recruitment team working for her. Now she can focus on the strategic aspects of growing her program, without having to deal quite so much with the daily grind.

What tasks can you put an autopilot with a screencast series today?

Have you had any major successes, where screencast planning and execution paid serious dividends in saved time and frustration? Leave a comment and tell us about it!

To your continued success,

Daniel

In just 10 minutes, you can learn not only how to sex up your videos, but also to become a generally more productive human being.

I know that’s a pretty tall order for ten minutes of your time, but I’m absolutely serious.

You see, I had a problem on one my recent projects. We had just wrapped a series of videos on a productivity system called The Secret Weapon. But now we needed to top it with a quick introduction that not only provided a bird’s eye view of the system, but had just enough razzamatazz to compel the good folks to actually watch. The overview needed something, but it took a while for me to figure out what it was. Then it hit me:

Ninjas.

We merged traditional screencasting and ninja-tastic cartoon animation in touting The Secret Weapon.  It shows just how effectively animation can work in “framing” your screencast material. Check out the video and see if you agree:

And there’s a side-benefit to tuning in. TSW is something you should be learning about, anyway. It’s a powerfully simple productivity workflow based on David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology that can help you become more relaxed and efficient in your work than you ever thought possible. TSW uses your e-mail client and the free (and awesome) Evernote software to collect, organize, and accomplish everything you need to get done.

I use it myself. And I don’t make any money at all by suggesting you do so as well.

Adopting this process is simple, free, and altogether wonderful. Over the years, I tried to implement the Getting Things Done system at least three or four times, and this is the first time it actually “stuck.” It has transformed my entire professional workflow, and it can do the same for you. At no charge.

But this is only the first of an entire video series about TSW, all of which you can check out here: http://www.thesecretweapon.org/

As I said, this information is 100% free. They don’t even ask you for an e-mail signup.

At any rate, let’s get back to the animatin’…

So why complicate your screencasting with animation? Because it gets results. Human beings (and other animals) are genetically conditioned to pay attention to motion. It has helped us over milennia to track both predators and prey, and therefore keep us alive. Animated segments are much more likely to penetrate the skulls of your audience than are static images. Motion helps them retain that information.

Plus, animation is sexy as all get-out, and thus also more likely to get viewed in the first place.

But what if I can’t draw or animate to save my life?

Doesn’t matter. I can’t draw, either. But the world is bursting with starving artists who can, and whose talents can be had on the cheap. Peruse one of the freelancer sites like Fiverr.com or ODesk, or better yet, contact the art department of your local college or university. Artists are increasingly leveraging tech skills as a way to make money with their art.

Even if you don’t necessarily want to populate your video with the silent deadliness of the ninja, you can now animate content directly in the major screencasting tools, without having to turn to more complicated softwares like After Effects or Motion. Camtasia Studio or Screenflow will work just fine, even if you’re just working with a series of still images. If you look at some of the other TSW videos we did, you can see that we utilized these slideshow-style animation effects to very good effect. Just get yourself some stock photos, and you zoom, pan, slide, and spin content to your heart’s content.

A bird’s eye overview of The Secret Weapon, a productivity workflow based on David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology.

A marketing spot for the TABS Insight market analysis tool.