The Visual Lounge lets you find out about TechSmith behind-the-scenes. Watch screencasts and videos from other customers, meet up with your fellow TechSmith users and staff, and get more tips and tricks!

This week's Screencast of the Week comes to us from a professional screencaster, Ian Ozsvald of ProCasts!

I liked this screencast for several reasons. Ian made great use of Camtasia Studio's SmartFocus feature - he used it to focus your attention on certain areas of the screen and show greater detail. The audio quality is great on this screencast which is important as viewers are generally intolerant of poor audio. The background audio music was a great touch and added polish to the screencast. And, Ian has a great voice for narration! The screencast runs 1:32 and is short and to the point. Perfect!

Ian gave me some info about how he made the screencast. The video was recorded with Camtasia Studio 5 and audio recorded using his sE2200a mic in Audacity. Visual effects were added using Adobe AfterEffects. Ian mentioned "We went with the screencast-in-monitor effect to give some context to not-so-computer-literate users who might be installing their first plugin for Firefox." Ian also said, "... since Adblock is the top1 (to top3, depends on the week) plugin for Firefox, many first-timers to Firefox try it and have questions, we tried to answer all those questions in this video." Screencasts are a great way to help first time users.

Ian is also publishing a 9-part blog series on how and why to screencast. Check it out here. And, this series formed the basis of a 40 minute podcast interview in Joel Spolsky's Business of Software forums. You can listen to the podcast here and read the discussion here.

You can follow Ian on his blog here or on Twitter here. Any nominations for next week's Screencast of the Week?