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What would you ever do if someone gave you a partridge in a pear tree? I often wondered that when hearing the song, "The Twelve Days of Christmas". All the gifts were impractical in that song. I thought it would be fun to make a more useful version of the traditional Christmas carol and change it to be "The 12 Days of Screencasting"!

12 expert Screencasters have shared their tips and screencasting advice with me. And, I'll share with you their insights over the next 12 days!

Sing it with me... "On the first day of Screencasting, Molly McDonald gave to me..."

Start your timers!

I know how long a screencast will be before I even record it by using the Stopwatch on my iPhone. I can turn on the Stopwatch, read through the script at a steady pace and see almost exactly how long the end result will be. This works great for deciding when to cut out content. If you time a script at 4 or 5 minutes you'll know that you need to cut out some of the "fluff" - Instead of wasting your time creating the video first and then realizing it needs to be cut down. If you don't have a Stopwatch on your phone there's a simple stop-watch Web app at Online Stopwatch.

Molly McDonald, aka DemoGirl, lives in San Francisco, CA and has been creating screencasts since 2006. Over the past 4 years she's gone from running a screencast blog to building a business that specializes in creating custom screencasts for companies all over the world. Her professional narration skills coupled with an excellent grasp of the technology she covers make her screencast services in high demand. Molly is also a monthly contributor of screencast tutorials for Butterscotch.com. You can learn more about her work by visiting Demo Girl which is run by her parent company, Centercloud LLC.

And, while we're on the subject of songs... some of our talented TechSmithies have recorded a screencasting carol, "Jing Love". I think it's the first song recorded about screencasting!

"Jing Love" was written and performed by:

• Steve Elgas - Software Engineer, Camtasia Studio: guitars, vocals
• Alex Novak - Software Engineer, Screencast.com: guitars
• Clint Hoagland - Software Test Specialist, Camtasia Relay: drum programming, engineering

#jing_love by vsComputer