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.