Screen capture tips & tricks

Even if you believe in your artistic abilities, relying on improvisation is a sure way to frustration. Even professional narrators rehearse their speech! So, if you do not want to record the narration a thousand times and to reduce the risk of "hmmm"-s and "ahhh"-s in your narration, before you start recording, write down the text you will narrate. Read it once or twice, mark the places where you will stop to get breath, rehearse reading it aloud and then proceed with clicking the Record button.

Even after serious repetition, there is no guarantee that you will not mispronounce a certain word, not omit a whole sentence, or make any other mistake. If you make a mistake, just pretend that everything is OK and go on as planned. Later, when you finish the recording, software will help you to correct it.

You might have never had to deal with the rules for writing texts for different media but if you do not keep to some standards, your text will be very difficult (if possible at all) to listen to. Rule number one is to avoid long sentences because by the time you have reached the end of the sentence, the listeners would have forgotten its beginning. Also, it is more difficult for you to read a long sentence properly. Rule number two: avoid difficult words that can be tongue-twisters for you and unfamiliar to your audience.

Even if you are using software that does not crash when the recording is long and/or the user can pause it anytime to continue it later, have in mind that long movies (over 5 or 6 minutes) are less effective from a communicative point of view. After the 5-minute threshold many people start to lose concentration and get distracted. If you have a lot to say (for instance with training tutorials), you'd better consider creating two or three or as many as needed separate movies than pack all the stuff into a single one. Besides, all equal, longer movies lead to larger files and it is obvious that putting a 100MB Flash file on your site for users to download is a pretty ridiculous marketing tactic.

If you are rushing to fit into the 5-minute limit, the worst you can do is to speed up your narration. If you do this, the only predictable result will be that your audience will have harder times decoding what you mean.

Screencasting programs are resource-hungry and can slow your computer considerably. All open programs consume resources as well, thus leading to an unrealistic tempo of the recording. So, close all unnecessary programs (and even restart your machine) before you start recording.

The majority of people have the strange habit not to read documentation but to go straight ahead and to refer to it only when they are stuck in the middle of an activity. This is completely wrong because documentation provides important information about how things get done in the particular program. Also, reading the newsgroups or forums about what other people have experienced in using the same program can be very rewarding in avoiding its pitfalls.

Video effects can be the spice of your demo but if you are concerned about the file size, stuffing demo with video effects can have a dramatic impact on its size.

In addition to wasting time, excessive editing can make the demo sound artificial. If the recording really is not good, you'd better put it into the archive and record a fresh copy. Editing a 5 minute demo movie shouldn't take you days.