As my wife will readily attest, I’m not much of a multi-tasker. When I try, things have a way of falling spectacularly apart.

Perhaps you can relate.

As such, I always record my screencast footage and my audio narration separately. But if you’re not a very experienced screencaster (and sometimes, even if you are), you’ll encounter difficulty putting those two streams of information together and synching them up.

This video will help you remedy that. Along with three other editing techniques, Clip Speed in Camtasia is an easy way of both synching stuff up as well doing some cool time-lapse effects. Check it out.

Honestly Compelling Screencast Narration

That was lovely, Daniel. You clearly have a lot of experience in front of the mic.
But you come across like a radio announcer. Remember, it can’t sound like acting.”

I was a little offended at that.

A few years ago, I attended a special workshop on voiceover acting for video games, put on by OMUK, a voiceover recording studio in London that specializes in video game dialogue. Aspiring performers come from all over the UK to train themselves up on the art and business of delivering a convincing voiceover performance in the increasingly sophisticated world of interactive entertainment. I had come all the way from Spain.

I had always taken pride on being myself in front of the mic, on staying genuine even when specifically creating a screencast with the goal of hard-selling a product. And yet there I was, being told that I sounded no more convincing than the schlock-jocks who hawk fan belts, fast food, and financial services down at Lite-FM.

Days after the workshop, I went back and listened to the segments I had recorded that day, and my eyes went wide. My instructor was right.

Honesty’s a rare commodity in VO delivery. The slick, singsongy warbles of the radio pitchman almost invite suspicion nowadays. Consumers have been taken in before. We’re wiser now.

Voice acting and screencasting narration aren’t remotely the same animal, of course. There are wildly different goals for each, but do remember that honesty in the delivery transcends all genres of voiceover work. It’s essential no matter what reason you’re going behind the mic.

So how to attain it, that’s the question. The cliché answer is “be yourself.” It sounds like something out of an after-school special. But sometimes clichés are so often repeated for a good reason. This one happens to be “right as rain.”

So let’s talk specific tips…

• First, take a look your script. Are there 75-cent words that have no place in everyday conversation? Strike them. Industry jargon that only a portion of your audience will understand? Simplify. The goal of your screencast isn’t to demonstrate how much smarter you are than your viewers. Whether training or marketing, you need to connect on a basic, human level. That’s a little hard to accomplish when you’re talking down to them.
• On a related note, try to use the first person in your narration when possible. When working for a large organization, I know this isn’t always feasible. A lot of companies shy away from letting individuals in their group be, well, individuals. But think about the last time you were on hold after dialing up some corporate entity: “Your call is very important to us.” Yeah, right. Now think about the times (increasingly rare nowadays) that you actually managed to reach a human being on the other end who was compassionate, personable, and eager to help. In screencasting, you want to be that dude (or dudette). When one person is empowered by their large, impersonal employer to spread their knowledge and enthusiasm in a personal way, good things happen. Check out The Cluetrain Manifesto for more information on this.
• Try to avoid too many layers of polish. It is of course vital to be professional. But one thing that’s always bothered me about products like Adobe Captivate, with its smooth-as-glass mouse movements, is that the content looks like a robot did it. In both your visuals and your narration, try to keep it a bit loose. Make an off-topic aside or a corny joke. Show a little emotion (so long as it’s genuine). Let ’em know there’s an actual human being behind the scenes. Of course, these assorted bits of personality tend to be first on the chopping block if you’re one of those unlucky souls who must submit their storyboards for committee review. Narrow minds will always try to suck the humanity out of your work in the interest of “professionalism.” Fight to maintain it when possible.

Based on this last point, it seems even I have some work to do, if my abysmal demo tape from that workshop is any indication. Radio announcers belong on the radio. Not in your screencast.

Captioning screencasts can help everyone, not just the hearing impaired.

Closed captioning on TV has been around since 1980, and it was a watershed moment in making mass entertainment accessible to people who couldn’t hear. As those who work in US government are well aware, section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act forces all productions, state and federal alike, to be closed captioned according a particular set of specs. This might sound like a hassle, until you realize just how world-changing it can be for your audience.

And as you’ll see, I do mean your ENTIRE audience.

No sound? No problem.

Audio is wonderful for helping to push your knowledge and enthusiasm across the ether. But you definitely don’t want to close off your message to people not receiving the audio portion of the program. This applies certainly to the deaf, but also to other folks who simply lack speakers on their PC.

Oh, and it’s super important if you’re publishing to Facebook, as the video clips in peoples’ feeds always run without sound unless specifically clicked on. You therefore want to provide a complete message without the reliance on sound.

Not everyone’s a native speaker.

Of course, even if the user is hearing your words loud and clear, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they can process what you’re saying.

Take it from a guy who has managed to acquire two foreign languages. Even though I’ve lived in Spain for over a decade, watching the news here still taxes my brain. But because I’m a voracious reader, I can parse written text a helluva lot better than a stream of speech, which to my ears sometimes feels like it’s coming out of a firehose.

Internet video technology can provide a bit of support in these cases. The abilities to replay misheard segments as well as slow down playback can both be a godsend to the non-native speaker.

Even so, a visual stream of the audio can work wonders in being understood by those with more limited language. In fact, you might want to check your web metrics to see where most of your users are coming from. If you have a particularly large set of international folks from the same place, a special version of your video with translated captions might be just the ticket.

A searchable video helps ALL your users.

Okay, at this point I’m speaking exclusively to users of Camtasia Studio, as it is the only screencasting or video tool (to my knowledge) that lets you do this incredibly cool thing. For this, you’ll need to produce using the TechSmith SmartPlayer.

Once you have captions in place, you’ll be able to make your entire video searchable. That’s right. EVERY SINGLE WORD of your production. This is an incredibly big deal for lengthy tutorials.

My Shadow the Screencaster course, for example, is two hours long. If someone vaguely recalls how I mentioned the process of animation easing, but doesn’t remember precisely where, a two-second search will bring them to that exact point in the course.

Human beings aren’t the only ones looking at your captions.

A little while back, one of my Boot Camp attendees asked me in class whether captions are parsed by the search engines. At the time, I wasn’t sure.

So I checked. Turns out that not only do the major search engines check out your captions, they’re actually a pretty important component of optimizing your videos for search.

Note that in order for this to work, the video must be closed captioned, that is, sport captions that the user can turn and off. Camtasia (on either platform) can do this, and you can also create or import captions with popular video services like YouTube or Wistia.

Of course, short, one-off screencasts created for a small group probably don’t merit the full “captioning treatment,” but if you’re creating lengthy material for a large audience, the extra time spent in synching up those captions can pay some pretty serious dividends for you, your videos, and the Internet as a whole.

Lessons for the aspiring screencaster from Strunk and White

A few years ago, I got a solid lesson in good screencasting from a most unexpected place.

Most Americans, at some point in their academic careers (could be high school, college, or in my case, both), have an English composition class foisted upon them by the local administration. This is done with the supposed motivation of churning out graduates who can express themselves succintly and coherently in written form. Persons armed with this knowlege will be able to master business reports, research studies, doctoral dissertations, you name it.

Or, at the very least, have the most eloquently written MacDonald’s employment application on the block…

One text that’s basically regarded as standard issue in these courses is The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White, and has been thus since its initial publication in 1959. I bought my first copy back in 1989, when the book was a mere pup at the tender age of 30. In its more than 50 years on the shelves, this tiny grey paperback has prevented millions of grammatical foibles the world over, defusing everything from awkward sentence structure to the careless use of non-words like irregardless.

I recently pulled my dog-eared copy of the shelf in an attempt to decide the correctness between “None of us were there” and “None of us was there” (it’s the latter, by the way), when I came across an essay at the back that I hadn’t remembered. It was called “An Approach to Style,” and moved away from the specific prescriptivist “grammar police” ruleset that comprised most of the book, and instead just offered up a list of basic guidelines to bear in mind when communicating with words.

I was astounded by how many of these suggestions were readily applicable to narrated visual media as well, despite the fact that it was written a good 45 years before Jon Udell ever coined the term “screencast.” I wanted to share a few of these with you.

Place yourself in the background. “Write in a way that draws the reader’s attention to the sense and substance of the writing, rather than the mood and temper of the author.”

This is a particularly sticky one for marketing screencasters. When crafting a video advertisement or marketing spot, it’s vitally important to focus on your audience. Their lives, their problems. With luck, you can be there to offer the solution. There are instances (such as this newsletter), where it’s appropriate for the author to be more “present” within the content. But you can’t ever lose sight of your users and the benefit to their lives that you’re attempting to bring to the table. More on this next month.

Do not overwrite. And this goes hand-in-hand with two other basic tenets of theirs, Write in a way that comes naturally and Avoid fancy words. “Rich, ornate prose is hard to digest, generally unwholesome, and sometimes nauseating.”

As you write your narration script, you must take care to avoid the kind of thick, jumbled wordiness that makes your video impossible to penetrate without a dictionary in hand. Most people won’t bother, so don’t use a 75-cent word when a 10-cent one will do. This goes doubly for industry terms and other technical jargon. Only use a technical term when no other more common replacement exists, and when you’re certain that at least 95% of your audience will understand it. Take a second in your narration to clarify the term if you’re not sure.

Do not explain too much. “It is seldom advisable to tell all.”

Amen, brothers. Amateur screencasters often make the classic rookie mistake of explaining every field and button. Even a comprehensive tutorial should exist to show completion of a given task or set of tasks. Clarify only those features and aspects of the application that are directly involved in getting the user from point A to point B. In screencasting, the hackneyed slang phrase “Too much information!” really does apply, so don’t inundate your audience with a lot of extraneous info.

Revise and rewrite. “Revising is part of writing. Few writers are so expert that they can produce what they are after on the first try.”

Revision is a necessity in the screencast production process. If possible, try to segment your revision as much as possible. What does this mean? Well, take a quick look at my workflow, which generally goes something like this:

Write narration > Craft storyboard > Record footage > Edit silent cut > Record and clean up narration > Produce final output

You should be giving the decision-makers (clients, managers, etc.) access to your work at nearly every point in this process. If there’s an unnecessary paragraph in your narration, it’s a lot easier to correct early on, when it’s just words on paper. If something’s destined to get the ax, you’re wasting valuable time by coming up with visuals, recording clips, and cutting it all together.

Don’t overstate. “When you overstate, readers will be instantly on guard, and everything that has preceded your overstatement as well as everything that follows will be suspect in their minds because they have lost confidence in your judgment or your poise.”

Overstatements are dangerous territory, particularly for marketing screencasts. Yes, you want to convey the benefit of your product or service, and yes, those benefits should be as compelling as possible. Just don’t promise them the moon. Or, promise them the moon, provided you’re ready to deliver on that promise and you can provide good testimonials and other proof that you’re not just full of hot air.

Good stuff. The advice of these two men from nearly a half century ago is as relevant as ever to those of us who create content for a living.

“I need some images to make my screencasts look more presentable. Because I don’t want to get my company into trouble, I need to be absolutely sure the images are legit. Where do I go, and how do I get the best bang for my buck?”

There are a metric ton of online services for downloading pictures to spice up your video content. Where specifically to go is a matter of personal choice. But I think for everyone, a pay-to-download service should fulfill two basic goals:

1. It should grant you unlimited use at a very attractive price, and
2. The images should be very high quality, with lots of selection.

For  me personally, I have come to rely on Fotolia.com as a near perfect mix of quality, selection, and price.

Here are a few things that tip the scales for me in its favor:

1. You can choose between a credit-based system and a monthly subscription.
2. The subscription option is highly versatile. There are several monthly download quantities for all kinds of budgets. Also: If you don’t need a ginormous image (and for screencasting, you usually don’t), you can generally pick  something smaller that will only cost you half a download.
3. And my favorite part is that your unused downloads ROLL OVER. Screencasting projects are highly variable – I’ll need more downloads some months, and fewer in others. This feature means I’m covered either way.

So that’s the “why” of my choice, but today, I want to demonstrate the “how.” The following screencast will show you:

• How to go about choosing the right images for your project.
• How to organize and buy them, and
• How to do it as economically as possible.

Check it out…