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!

A blog post title caught my eye last week, 'Why Most Screencasts And Online Presentations Are Tedious (And How To Fix It)'! I knew I had to check it out! Turns out it was written by Sean D'Souza who has a great site, PsychoTactics, that uses an understanding of psychology to understand why customers buy (or do not buy).

I love Sean's blog post and screencast. He talks about techniques they use in TV programing like the scene, camera angle or some other change in the shot. Typically there is a change every seven seconds. Now, if you look at the typical screencast or tutorial, you're more than likely watching the same single frame with the same presenter. No change. Makes it hard for the brain to pay attention at this point without movement on the screen.

What can you do to keep your viewers attention? Sean tells you the answer about how to not put your viewers brains to sleep, how to replicate the movement you see on TV and how to solve other problems on his blog post here. He answers many of the questions about on his blog plus he even has a great screencasting comic!

Here's Sean's great screencast. I like his use of music, narration, titling, SmartFocus and of course, his content! It's a short screencast that runs under 3 minutes. Enjoy!

Congrats to Sean for winning the Screencast of the Week award!

Any nominations for next week?

I recently heard from a Camtasia Studio user, Vivek Joshi who is a Product Specialist at IDV Solutions which happens to be right down the road from TechSmith in lovely Lansing, Michigan! :-)

Vivek has a hobby website he works on in his spare time called FindYourAuto.net. Vivek wrote an article about the site and entered it in a contest at Microsoft. In addition to his article, he also included a Camtasia Studio screencast with his submission. Others in the contest submitted only articles. With his screencast, Vivek was able to not only tell, but show what was cool with his website. And, he won first place! Screencasts can give a competitive advantage!

Kelly Rush, our Video Production Specialist, got a quick video with Vivek to hear about his FindYourAuto.net and how he's using Camtasia Studio. Check it out below. It runs less than 2:30 minutes.

Hardware used to create this screencast:

• Canon HF200 camera
• HP HDX18t laptop

Software:

• Adobe Premiere CS4
• Camtasia Studio

Congrats Vivek! Can't wait to see what you create next!

Got a great use of one of our products or some tips and tricks? Drop me an e-mail or leave a comment - I'd love to share your story!

How many of you screencasters thought people would be asking you for your autograph?! It could happen! I'm getting in line to get Len Charnoff's autograph!

Len's Camtasia Studio screencast was just shown on national television on a popular news show in the US, the Today Show!

How did Len's Screencast end up on the Today Show?

Len discovered a site, Yard Sale Treasure Map (YSTM). On Len's blog, Time Saving Tutorials, he did this screencast review of YSTM. YSTM mentioned Len's screencast on their 'About' page. Len noticed he was getting a lot of traffic to his blog that he was getting a lot of hits from YSTM. Then he received an email from DailyCandy.com saying that one of their editors was appearing on the Today Show and wanted to use his screencast. The Today Show picked up the story and the rest is history as they say!

You can see Len's screencast in the video below. You can also hear Len's voice in the background! Len's screencast appears in the segment around 2:00 minutes into the video.You can hear Len's voice in the background!

Bravo zulu, Len!

Where will your screencasting take you?! I'll be the first in line to get an autograph from you!

I think we may have a new world record... 1,000 screencasts! I just heard from Bill Jelen, aka Mr Excel, that he's completed his 1,000th screencast. And, each screencast was created with Camtasia Studio!

Every day, Monday through Friday, Bill produces a new Excel screencast. The screencasts average in length around 2 minutes. His first episode went out on October 15, 2005 and the 1,000th episode went out on September 15, 2009. At five episodes per week, it took just under 4 years. Bill does take about 5 days off per year for various holidays.

I asked Bill how we got started screencasting. He mentioned to me that back in 2005, he was traveling to Toronto every month to tape two episodes each month on Call for Help with Leo Laporte. Both of the hosts were early podcasters; Leo Laporte had started his audio This Week in Tech podcast in April 2005 and Amber MacArthur had started her CommandN video podcast in June of 2005. Bill became aware of podcasting around the time he was taping the July episodes. In August, Leo suggested a MrExcel podcast. By September, Bill had taped a 25 minute pilot, and it was Leo who suggested a short daily podcast instead of a longer weekly podcast. The podcast went live October 15, 2005. And, the rest is history as they say.

That idea...five podcasts a week...allowed Bill to be one of the first to reach the 1000 episode mark early.

Bill also shared with me how he creates the screencasts. He records the camrec and then sends it off to Lora White who edits and produces. In the beginning, Lora spent 18-20 minutes on each episode to edit and produce them. Bill would send her detailed notes on every edit, like..."I screwed up this word at 1:07". Now, we use the term "Pickup" to indicate that I screwed up the last part and I am restarting. Now, Lora spends 10 minutes start to finish to edit and produce each 2-3 minute episode.

You can see all of Bill's screencasts here

Simply amazing! Congrats Bill! Can't wait to see the next 1,000 screencasts you create!

Last weekend I jumped in the car and headed to Ann Arbor, Michigan. Why? They were having a "GiveCamp". Haven't heard of a GiveCamp? Well, they truly a wonderful thing. Here's the lowdown:

"A GiveCamp is a weekend-long event where software developers, designers, and database administrators donate their time to create custom software for non-profit organizations. This custom software could be a new website for the nonprofit organization, a small data-collection application to keep track of members, or a application for the Red Cross that automatically emails a blood donor three months after they've donated blood to remind them that they are now eligible to donate again. The only limitation is that the project should be scoped to be able to be completed in a weekend." See here for more info

The event kicked off on Friday and the developers and charities worked round the clock all weekend long. Some people camped out, while others pulled all nighters working on their code. At the end of Give Camp, the teams of developers, designers, database admins and charities present their project to the group. There's usually not a dry eye in the building.

While I was visiting, I got to talking with one of the sponsors, Matt Lagrotte from Verio (TechSmith was a sponsor too). Turns out that Matt is putting Camtasia Studio to good use at his company. I shot a quick 2 minute video with Matt so you could hear how he's using it and get his advice. The audio is not perfect since we were in the middle of GiveCamp central, but hopefully it is tolerable. :-)

Tools used to create the video:
Flip HD Mino
HP Compaq 8510
Camtasia Studio
Screencast.com

And, curious to see what a GiveCamp 'looks' like. Check out the quick video below from Patrick Steele. It's very entertaining! Jennifer Marsman has a great recap of the event here. I also snapped some pics which you can see here.

Inspired? Why not set up a GiveCamp in your area? You can see here how to coordinate your own event. Not a techie? Fear not, there's still lots you can help with at GiveCamp... bake cupcakes, teach a charity how to use Twitter, stuff envelopes, help set up work spaces... and so on.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what's a screencast video worth? How about $2.4 million?! I was really excited to see this 'tweet' this morning on Twitter from Paolo Tosolini at Microsoft.

Paolo has been doing amazing stuff at Microsoft - he has created a "Podcast-in-a-Box". These are audio/video creation kits that allow Microsoft employees to capture and share their knowledge with each other in a rich multimedia format. In the Podcast-in-a-Box kit, there is a copy of Camtasia Studio plus a Flip video camera and professional audio recorder among other things.

Paolo captured a great video with Bob Lincavicks. Bob is an Information Worker Solution Specialist at Microsoft. He shares his story about how he leveraged Academy Mobile (Microsoft's internal enterprise podcasting platform) and applications like Camtasia as sales tools to close a $2.4M deal. How's that for ROI?! The video runs 4:30. Check out Bob's story below.

Paolo is willing to share his knowledge about enterprise podcasting with you - if you have any questions, email Paolo or you can find him on Twitter here

Got a story you'd like to share about how you're using Camtasia Studio, Snagit, Jing, Morae or Screencast.com? Grab a video camera and tell it to me! I'd love to share it!

This week's Screencast of the Week has it all... Great music, Picture-in-Picture, SmartFocus, Tilt and more. Kris Rzepkowski used a Camtasia video to communicate the launch of a new intranet at link Hudson. This is one high quality screencast!

What a great way to launch a new website! Entertaining and informative.

Check out Kris Rzepkowski's blog for a great post about the launch of Hudson's SharePoint Intranet (Challenge, User Research, Design, Development/Beta Launch)

Any nominations for next week's Screencast of the Week?

Brooks Andrus and I are having a great time at 360|Flex today! We had a chance to catch up with Renaun Erickson, a RIA developer at Adobe and who is also the driving force behind Structured Log Testing, an open source project for RIA Flash platform developers.

Renaun shared with us the benefits of visual communication for him and how he needed a little more than Jing for his screencasting (he hit the 5 minute limit). He shared how he uses Camtasia Studio.

And, in keeping with the bacon theme, we got Renaun to try one of the maple bacon lollipops we brought to the conference! He may be the biggest bacon fan I have ever met! The video is just under 4 minutes long...

We recorded the video with a Flip HD Mino camera and Brooks edited and produced the video using Adobe Premiere and After Effects

The pic above is by Eric Stoike - See more of his great pics from 360|Flex here