I have created tons of screencast videos over the past few years for marketing affiliate products, marketing my info products and to create training videos. Here are the top 7 tips for making the screencasts much better and professional.
- Prepare Your PC
The Software required to record screencast videos requires a quite high PC power so it’s always a good idea to restart your computer before you start the software and start recording. When you restart your computer the videos always turn out better.
It’s also good to close as many background apps as possible, background apps such as; backup software, synchronization services, and instant messengers. Turning off system audio is also a good idea because notification sounds can appear when you have a new email etc. and that may distract you.
- Have a Professional Background Image
If you’re doing something on your desktop while recording such as opening folders, opening new applications, etc. it’s a good idea to have a desktop wallpaper in the background that looks great for your background. You may not want a background that is too cluttered and distracting etc.
Instead, you can have clean and good looking desktop wallpaper and/or even make sure that your logo, if you have one, is visible on there somewhere. Doing this keeps it professional.
- Noise Free Audio…
Before you start to record make sure to test drive all your audio recording equipment so that everything works properly. Also, set up your screen capture software in such a way that the audio recording is made in a .wav format.
If you create your audio recording in a .wav format the file will likely be a bit bigger than if you were to create it in the .mp3 or .ogg format. There are advantages if you record the audio in the .wav format. During screen capture videos there’s often noise in the background.
- Have a Voice-Over Script
If you are creating videos for marketing or demonstrating your product or service, always write a script of what you’re going to say first and then afterward, you can do the audio recording while reading directly from the script.
That way everything that you say will be clearer and your speech pattern will be smoother. If you’re creating a screencast video or if you’re creating a PowerPoint presentation you can then just simply play the audio recording in the background and you can synchronize the audio with the video so that the two of them “fits together.”
- Record at Maximum Possible Resolution
When you’re recording a screencast video I recommend that you record it at a high resolution. If you record the video using a low resolution you can’t increase the resolution later, however, if you record the video at a high resolution you can always lower the resolution later when the video is already created and still keep the high quality.
The standard resolution for a video in the DVD format is 720 x 486 and if you’re creating the video in a wide-screen DVD format then the resolution is 864 x 486. If you’re creating a video that you are going to upload online, then I recommend 1280 x 720 wide-screen resolutions which is usually called as 720p. YouTube loves this kind of videos and helps you to get gazillion YouTube views.
I hope that these 4 tips will be useful when you create your screencast videos. Share your screencast experience with me and other readers…
