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Camtasia Screencast of the week about...screencasting

Posted on Tuesday April 18, 2006 by Betsy Weber

Bill Myers

Bill Myers is my hero. I recently asked him to e-mail his top tips for screencasting for an article I'm working on. He decided to answer my questions not with an e-mail, but with a screencast!

You can read and watch Bill Myers' top tips for screencasting here.

What are your tips?

Comments (1)

Patrick Fitzgerald :

Good tips! Here are some of my own:

http://www.barelyfitz.com/blog/archives/2006/04/20/342/

Come up with the general walkthrough of what you’re trying to show. Don’t worry too much about what you’re going to say yet. Run through it once or twice for practice.

Start recording. I don’t use the audio from this recording so just mumble along with what you’re doing. If you screw up don’t worry, just keep recording and go back to an earlier point to start again. Between each procedure it helps if you place the mouse in an open position and pause for a few seconds - this will give you an edit point without the mouse wantering around. Keep all your mouse movements very calculated.

Edit the video: determine which parts of the video you’re going to use. Before chopping anything up, write your script in a text editor and keep it open next to the video (it’s helpful if you have dual monitors). Practice each part on the video, then edit the video to remove all the extra junk. Try to leave a little extra space so you have wiggle room for the voice narration.

Start recording your voice narration. I do this in small snippets: save each part in a file (1.wav, 2.wav) then add it to the audio track and align it with the video.

The only disadvantage to this technique is that the screencast might appear too “scripted” and not spontaneous enough, but for what I’m doing I was okay with that.

Quote floater

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