[Ad] need a break from coding?
© copyright 04.Jul.2008 by Paul Bradley filed under Video
[Ad] need a break from coding?
I have started creating video demonstrations for the software products we create, this short article outlines the things I have learned in the course of making my first video demo, I hope you find it useful.
If the video demonstration is important to you, then take the time to write and refine a script. If it helps, sketch out a story board on paper highlighting the key points you want to get across in the video. Practice running through the sequence of screens while dictating the script many times before capturing anything to video. This gives you a chance to refine the script, and practice your timing.
There are lots of software products available that let you capture your screen actions to video and record your voice at the same time. CamStudio is a free open source product that lets you record your screen and voice at the same time to an AVI movie file. On first trying CamStudio I was a bit disappointed, as my voice was always ahead of the video, and the longer the video recording the worse it got.
However, after doing some research I managed to get the settings right in CamStudio to allow the speech and video to stay synchronised. To do this, I download and installed the DivX codec, and set the video options within CamStudio to use the DivX compressor with a quality of 60 percent, and key frames being captured every 30 frames. You also need to capture frames every 50 milliseconds, with a playback rate of 20 frames per second.
I am glad I stuck with it, and can now recommend CamStudio, it's what I use to capture all my video demonstrations.
You can record your voice while capturing the screencast with CamStudio, and for the best results ensure you have decent microphone like the Samson C01U. It is actually quite hard to dictate your script when operating the screencast, while not trying to sound like your reading, and at the same time trying to inject some passion into your voice, so that you don't become monotonous.
After several hours of practicing and still not liking my results, I decided to invest in hiring a professional voice over artist. You can find voice over talent at either voices.com or opuzzvoice.com, where you can browse artists by male/female and sort by hourly rates. Most profiles have samples of their voice style and quality. My advice would be to find an artist you like, and then try to find their official web site and request a quote directly from them.
All these voice over artists have professional quality home studios, with high end sound recording gear, and can usually deliver edited WAV or MP3 files - which have all the pops and breaths edited out.
I sent them the script, and got back a very professional voice over in WAV format. I then listened to the voice track, as I recorded the screencast demo, and then edited the voice and video data streams together to produce the final video demonstration.
You can use something like Windows Movie Maker, which you can download for free, for splicing the voice and video files together, adding title screens and video transition effects. After producing the final WMV movie file, you can upload and host the movie at a service like YouTube.com.
Depending on your requirements, a service like YouTube could be all you need, but these types of services compress the video to an extent that can render it blurred. Plus I don't like the way they show links to related videos at the end of yours as this could potentially show links to your competitors videos.
For this reason, I decided to host the video demonstrations on my own web site, and if the video's become really popular then I will host them on Amazon S3 and serve them via a sub-domain of my web site.
If you decide to host the video demonstrations yourself, then ideally you will want them be Flash movie files (SWF). While CamStudio does come with a SWF producer, I found the results to poor as noise was added to the video, and the player interface which you embed into your web pages doesn't look very professional.
For professionally produce Flash movie files, you should evaluate Camtasia Studio, at $299 I think it's very reasonable if your going to produce a lot of video screencasts. The video editing options are superior to Windows Movie Maker, as you can create pan and zooms within your captured video.
In the end I used Camtasia Studio, to splice the WAV file produced by my voice over artist, with the video I captured from CamStudio, to create the final movie.
You can watch the final video demonstration on the JPEG 2 ICO product page.
About the Author
Paul Bradley is a VB.NET software developer living and working in Cumbria. He provides PHP & MySQL bespoke development services via his software development company, Carlisle Software Limited.
He has over 20 years programming experience.
