1. Before we proceed with the questions related to Screencasting, it would be great if you could give us some information about yourself and how you jumped in the screencasting industry. Do tell us more about your company.

ProCasts makes professional screencasts for companies to convert more visitors into users, hence improving the company’s income. Currently it is me and my 3 years of screencasting experience, shortly I’ll be expanding to bring more skills into the company including animators and graphic designers. We’re based in the UK so the ‘voice of ProCasts’ is that of a clear, educated UK male.

ProCasts grew out of my role creating and growing ShowMeDo. ShowMeDo is a peer-produced screencast site focused on teaching you new skills about open-source software. Kyran Dale and I started the site 3 years ago because, quite simply, no screencast-focused site for open-source existed. Now we get over 100,000 users a month watching tutorials made by over 100 authors, 1/7th of the tutorials are mine covering topics like Python programming, Firefox and of course Screencasting.

During our growth I’d get approached by companies asking for professional promotional and tech-support screencasts, this activity first became ‘ShowMeDo Services’ and then grew into my ProCasts. ProCasts is now my primary activity.

Whilst the job of ProCasts is to provide the requested screencast, we take the job of delivering the *right* screencast very seriously. Each screencasts carries a full money back guarantee – if it doesn’t achieve the desired results then we don’t feel we deserve to be paid (I hasten to add – nobody has ever requested a refund!).

Prior to all of this I’m a trained Artificial Intelligence researcher with 5 years experience running multi-national teams solving cutting-edge problems. I’m also somewhat an academic – I feel that learning and spreading knowledge is a way to make the world a better place. Screencasting helps fulfill this role as videos are a very efficient way of showing a remote user exactly how something works and why they should pay attention and get more involved.

2. Which software do you use for creating screencasts and if you were to suggest any software for amateurs then which software will be those?

I do all my work on a Windows XP machine using CamTasia 6 and professional audio equipment. CamTasia 6 cannot be beaten on Windows, for the money you get excellent tools which can be picked up within an hour. I record all my audio using Audacity, this gives me excellent control for editing and provides tools like level-compression to balance out dominant frequencies.

If you are using Windows and you’re serious about screencasting I’d strongly suggest getting the 30 day free trial of CamTasia. If you’re on a budget then the open-source CamStudio is free and ‘pretty good’ (see CamStudio tutorials at ShowMeDo). If you couple it with VirtualDubMod you get rudimentary editing features with a fairly easy learning curve all for free. Audacity is a great open-source audio editor if your sound-track needs cleaning up.

On a Mac I believe that ScreenFlow is favoured, I also know that iShowU is a nice tool.

For Linux I recommend RecordMyDesktop.

If you’re experimenting then do try TechSmith’s Jing (they make CamTasia), ScreenToaster and ScreencastOMatic, these are web-based screencasting tools so you don’t have to install anything. The downside is reduced capture rates and a lack of editing tools but they’re great for easy experimentation.

3. What is your choice and why (specifically in relation with Screencasts) Mac, Windows or Linux | Commercial software or Open-source?

Often I create screencasts for Windows desktop software, so Windows is my primary platform. Typically I use Firefox or Safari for website-based screencasts, so the underlying platform isn’t so important. I definitely recommend commercial screencasting software as the capture codec and editing tools are superior to free alternatives.

Macs have a wider range of editing tools and shortly we’ll be using Macs alongside Windows. Linux users have the hardest time – the screencasting tools aren’t so powerful and the editors have a steeper learning curve, hopefully as the market grows this will improve. If I need to make Linux screencasts I use a virtual environment like VirtualBox running Ubuntu on Windows.

4. Is there any special hardware required when it comes to doing the recording or any high end microphone is good enough for recording. What precautions should be taken to reduce the background noise?

Inside ShowMeDo I started with a low-end 3.5mm analgue mic, over the years I have upgraded my setup to the point that I only use studio-quality recording gear (currently an se2200a mic with phantom power on a vibration-free mount).

Along the way I have also used a ATM73a headset and Shure SM57 (as used by US presidents!). The choice of upgrade reflected the increased quality of my vocal work – I kept hearing the noise on lower-end mics and wanted clear, noise-free sound-tracks.

For those experimenting you’ll go a long way with a reasonable low-end USB mic, around ¬£30UK/$40US. USB is digital so all the analogue noise-problems involving 3.5mm jacks (the noise often comes from within the motherboard!) are avoided, basic USB mics generally don’t need drivers and will work anywhere.

Make sure you always speak to the mic from the same direction and distance – if you turn your head or change your distance you’ll alter the volume of your voice, this will come through on the final recording.

You can use post-processing to remove undesirable noise but the main advice is to try to record clean sounds from the outset. Cover your PC with a thick blanket to reduce fan/hard-drive noise, shut your windows, unplug fans or pumps (e.g. in a fridge/freezer) – do everything you can to reduce the background noise that will reach your mic.

After recording do a noise-removal step, Audacity is great for this, most screencasting programs also have this built-in. Make sure you only pick a region of pure background noise (no clicks, certainly no speech) when sampling the background noise.

Audacity also lets you apply ‘audio compression’ – this levels out strong bass or treble features so the overall shape of the sound is more balanced. Normalise the audio to -3db so it is ‘fairly loud’ at a normal volume setting, this means it’ll sound just fine on most people’s PCs. If you have strong sibilants you may need to manually lower the volume (use ‘fade out’ or ‘adjust volume’ in Audacity) of the sibilant section lest the strong ‘essess’ hiss at a painfully loud volume.

When you breathe or cought it’ll sound bad if it stays in the final recording – Audacity can easily be used to delete the offending sound replacing that region with no sound at all. If you’ve removed background noise already then you’ll have a perfect noiseless region in place of breaths.

Definitely do pay attention to the quality of your audio, removing noise and cutting out unnecessary pauses are great first steps to making a sound-track that others will enjoy listening to.

Consider using low-volume background music – not only does it set the scene but it can also cover up bad vocals!

5. Your Examples page lists a set of your clients, can you share any wonderful experiences?

The most recent excellent experience was working with Justin of AppBeacon just two days before Christmas. He expected Christmas to be a bumper period for iPhone activations and he wanted his AppBeacon – an improved guide to iPhone apps – to be primed for the new visitors.

His problem was that users didn’t understand his service and tended to click away too soon. Rather than spend money increasing his in-bound traffic he wanted to convert more visitors into signed-up members and active users. He contacted me two days before Christmas with his brief.

I’d planned to take a whole week off for Christmas but could see the opportunity for Justin to build his business. In 48 hours we developed the script and I delivered a finished screencast on Christmas Eve, we’ve documented the process on our respective blogs.

In his write-up Justin delivers two great quotes. First, we achieved his goals to improve real usage by new users:

My bounce rate has decreased about 7 percent per day. Since having the screencast up, the site’s sign up rate has doubled.

and second, he gives a glowing recommendation:

I would strongly suggest that anyone needing a screencast consider using Ian at ProCasts. He was very professional and provided great feedback and suggestions for making the screencast better. I really appreciate his dedication and effort in getting the AppBeacon screencast completed before Christmas.

A second great experience was whilst working with BrandWatch. Giles (CEO) wanted more first-time visitors to understand their product – BrandWatch is an on-line sentiment analysis service that lets you monitor your brand. It is a complex service and lacks a free account – without a sales tour you never get to see the app working. Understandably many first-time visitors bounced away.

We developed and deployed their frontpage screencast within a week (see their frontpage and our Examples page). Shortly after I posted the screencast to Vimeo for extra publicity – it was spotted by a reporter who, intrigued by what he saw, went on to write a piece about the service at CNET. Josh had never heard of BrandWatch before seeing the Vimeo post.

Typically each of our clients wants to convert more visitors into users of their service or tool, or they want to show users how to achieve specific actions (like closing an account) to decrease support requirements and give their users more confidence.

6. What are the resources that one should refer to, if one wants to learn screencasting?

First – read Michael Pick’s prior interview, he gives some great links.

My main advice would be to:

1. record something
2. get feedback
3. experiment from the feedback

ShowMeDo has a friendly community if you’d like feedback about open-source based screencasts, alternatively you can always upload a video to a site like Vimeo and mail your friends for feedback.

TechSmith’s site has lots of information on how to use CamTasia, you might find that information translates to other applications. I’ve found myself forwarding these entries on to others in the past:

1. Oreilly.
2. Smashing Magazine.

7. Screencasting industry is pretty new, what are the issues you face and where do you see the screencasting industry going in next decade?

Currently screencasting is great for recording live usage of an application – it isn’t so great if you have slides or you want to use other presentation techniques (such as block-diagrams or animations). The tools are setup to focus on capturing the screen but they aren’t designed to offer a full range of multimedia techniques.

Often we use screencasts to teach first-time users about a new product or to show support material to existing users – combining animation and diagrams with screencasts is important. A part of ProCasts’ growth in the coming months will be to incorporate the skills of great graphic artists and animators into our offering.

The adoption of the new MP4 standard is a move towards giving us higher-definition screencasts at larger resolutions, this replaces the venerable FLV standard. Currently we’re seeing around 90% adoption of MP4-compatible Flash installs, I’d love to see this grow above 95% so we can switch to this new standard without losing viewers with older versions of Flash.

Screencasts are also very passive – they’re just like TV. Whilst it is possible to use SWF to integrate interactive elements, I feel this process needs a rethink. What happens if you have two types of user – one who is comfortable with the web, sign-ups and interaction whilst the other is new and afraid of what might happen if they click the wrong thing? How about if we could easily offer 1 screencast presentation that suits the needs of both?

The lack of multi-language support will have to improve. Currently we assume that the viewer knows our native language. What if they don’t understand spoken English so well? How do I (the screencaster) know which other languages are needed? How can the user choose a different sound-track?

Support for subtitles should definitely improve, I’m as guilty as others here in not providing subtitles in ProCasts production (not be design – the client often doesn’t want them!). Subtitles are great for accessibility and for viewers in an office who don’t have speakers, they really ought to come as standard.

I’d also like to see further support for webcams. Currently you ‘get what the webcam sees’ which might not give you a desirable background. How about if we could blue-screen the background and superimpose a different image – perhaps a logo or nice backdrop rather than just the wall of your office?

A very warm thanks to Ian!

I hope that you all must have enjoyed the detailed and answers with full of patience. This definitely shows Ian’s passion towards the screencasting. I really can’t expect any better answers than any of these. If Michael’s answers can be called tasty ice-cream then Ian’s answers are that wonderful cherry on the top!

And for all our readers! Happy screencasting & blogging!

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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Q. I know that most of you already know about you, still I would request you to please tell us some thing about you. May be something unique which you would like to share with our readers and which you’ve not shared with the world yet.

Hmm. Well, many people who know me online don’t know this but for the longest time, I had a fear of roller coasters. A pretty bad fear to have considering I live about an hour and a half away from Cedar Point. After many years of convincing from my father and my internal fear system, I finally went to Cedar Point and beat my fear into the ground by making the Millennium Force my first ever roller coaster ride. At the time, this was the world’s tallest roller coaster. I thought to myself that if I could ride this beast, every other coaster would be a cinch to ride. However, even though I rode this coaster, I still have a small amount of fear left inside of me and it really depends on the day or my mood whether or not I ride a coaster.

Q. Now that everyone knows that how passionate you are about WordPress, we all would love to know that what’s your favorite feature of WordPress?

Well, since WordPress 2.7 has yet to be released to the public, I suppose I can’t say that a feature inside of that version is my favorite so I’ll give you my favorite in the 2.6 branch. It’s called Automatic Plugin Upgrades. Thanks to the work of the WordPress dev team and the API for the WordPress plugin repository, users of WordPress 2.6 and above are treated in knowing when an update is available for a plugin they have installed. Visiting the plugin manager allows you to click an upgrade link that takes care of the entire plugin upgrade process. This has been a major time saver in my opinion and takes a huge chunk of the manual labor out of administering a WordPress installation.

Q. You are a writer at performancing and bloggertalks, so could you please tell us more about these blogs and how exactly they are helping you in building your profile?

Performancing is a blog that was started by Nick Wilson to compliment the Performancing FireFox extension that is commonly known now as ScribeFire. The site has been around since December 21st, 2005 which is ironically, the same day as my birthday. Performancing exists to help bloggers succeed. This is accomplished by publishing posts that are based on experience. Performancing has had an all star line up of bloggers pass through its presence such as Darren Rowse, Chris Garret, Liz Strauss, etc. I’ve been writing for Performancing since June of 2007 and when you look back throughout the sites history and realize all of the big names that have written for the site at one time or another and then you combine that with the sites almost 10,000 RSS subscribers, writing for Performancing is good job to have. This has provided me great exposure as a writer and has allowed me to showcase my talents in front of a wide audience.

BloggerTalks was originally created by Thord Daniel Hedengren and served as a one stop shop for bloggers who matter. BloggerTalks provides an outlet for these successful people to tell their stories, share their experiences and hopefully, provide opportunities on a weekly basis for readers to learn. Thord has interviewed a large number of people since the sites inception and I’ve been lucky enough to pick up where he has left off. Doing these interviews each week gives me the opportunity to learn from those who have a story to tell. Writing for BloggerTalks has shown my ability to perform interviews with well known and sometimes, not so well known bloggers. Each site has helped build my reputation as a content producer and each has their own audience which I now broadcast content to.

Q. You maintain two podcasts, WordPress weekly and PerfCast, can you please tell us that which tools do you use and what things do you keep in mind while preparing for the podcast?

People are surprised to learn all the time that all I use for equipment is a Plantronics headset with an attached boom mic and a SIP client (X-Lite) to connect to Talkshoe. I don’t use mixers, expensive recording equipment or anything fancy. Connecting to Talkshoe by means of a SIP client has allowed me to have a great sounding voice for the show despite not recording locally.

I try to keep in mind that the audience I am talking to and the medium I am using are completely separate from the blog. When David and I re-launched Perfcast, I thought we would have a big audience right off the bat thanks to the large RSS subscriber base of the Performancing blog. As I found out, the blog audience has not really transitioned well to the audio format and so, I’ve had to change my strategy and the way we produce the show by keeping in mind that there are those who listen to the show but don’t read the blog while there are many people who read the blog but don’t listen to the show.

Q. Can you share a tip or two with our readers, when it comes to freelancing. Like how to find new jobs and how can one go about finding freelance blogging jobs if they don’t have any portfolio?

Well, it’s no secret that if you’re a freelancer looking for a job, the first stop on your journey should be FreeLance Writing Gigs as they provide excellent job listings that they discover across the web.

If one is interested in freelance writing online, the single most important thing you SHOULD do is have a blog. This blog should be used as your always updating resume. If you’ve got what it takes, interested parties will discover your work through any number of means and offer you a job. This is what happened to me. I began writing a blog and set out to do it for one year as an experiment. I wanted to see what would happen to me after one year and when I reached the 6 month point in the project, a major WordPress community site owner approached me and asked if I would be interested in writing for him and that he would pay me. That was a shock to me considering I had no idea someone would be reading what I published on my blog and then offer me a paid writing gig to write the same content but for them.

Also, when you are hired on to write content for someone else, do the absolute best job that you can. Remember, each site you write for usually means your work will appear in front of new eyeballs. Also, those who read your content may be your future employer. Use each writing gig as a stepping stone to something bigger and better.

Q. How do you find Habari Project, do you think it will be able to compete with WordPress given the fact that many prolific developers of WordPress are heading that project?

What a way to put me on the spot! David and I had the distinct privilege of interviewing two of the lead developers of the Habari project on Perfcast Episode 9. What Habari is and what they are doing is interesting. However, I did ask them if they planned on becoming the next WordPress and their response was no. (My opinions) The fact of the matter is, Habari is created by a group of people who used to develop for WordPress but because of annoyances with the software they decided to take matters into their own hands and create a piece of software that solves the problems they had with WordPress. Habari should not be looked at as competition to WordPress but instead, as another choice for bloggers to use instead of WordPress.

Will Habari ever overtake WordPress? Probably not or at least, not any time soon. Considering this is not one of the core goals for Habari, quite a lot would have to happen in order for there to be a mass exodus of WordPress users to switch over. (End of my opinions)

Q. Is there any blogging advise you’d love to share with our readers?

For starters, those who fret about SEO are fretting over nothing. Get it out of your head that SEO is the answer to all of your blogs problems. I’m certainly not the first nor will I be the last to tell you that great, quality, unique content is king of the hill. Whether it be text, audio, video, content brings in traffic. If you use common sense and you keep everything you publish on your blog relevant to the niche you’re writing about, everything will fall into place. I’m not saying ignore SEO completely as there are a few things you should do such as nice looking permalinks and a few other tidbits but don’t put 100% of your effort into SEO. Be relevant, use common sense, and create great content. By the way, that will be $800.00 please :)

Be friendly. Be social, very social. Use Twitter, FriendFeed or some other micro blogger or social networking service. Contribute to the web and contribute to the blogs you enjoy by producing thoughtful comments. Get engaged with your audience, engage with the audiences of others sites. Link out, expand your reach. Continuously linking in is a shady thing to do. Don’t obsess over your sites statistics. Meet those who influence you face to face at conferences when you can. These events help build long lasting relationships. Get it out of your head early that it’s not all about you. Last but not least, have fun and make sure you are passionate about whatever it is you write about. If there was one thing that all highly successful bloggers have in common it would be passion.

I would again love to thank Jeff for sharing some insightful thoughts and tips with our readers and also sharing about his fear of Roller Coasters (I just love them, the thrill they give is just awesome) and thanks to him for also being the judge of our blog design contest.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2008. | Permalink

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1. Rajat Bhadani – Blog Design Studio was brain child of Rajat and me. Rajat comes with a background in design, sales and he loves to travel. He has travelled around 30 countries and one wonderful business man. You can find more about him and his achievements at his LinkedIn profile.

2. Nikola Dimev – Nikola (Nik – as we call him) is our partner in Blog Design Studio and when it comes to playing with WordPress as a CMS, then he comes into the picture. He can play with the code and loves Flash and Action Script. His LinkedIn profile will surely give you more information about his past experience and his expertise.

3. Oliver Efremov – Oliver (we call him Oli, although he prefers the name Etheric Loopz) is our lead designer/coder for WordPress themes. All the beautiful work which you see in our portfolio came out from this creative mind. He loves music and his superpower allows him to listen to all kind of music. Unfortunately, he isn’t an online social animal!

4. Mayank Gupta – That’s me! I’m a professional blogger and started Blog Design Studio with Rajat & Nik. I maintain few other blogs apart from Blog Design Studio and they are ReviewSaurus and Windows 7 Log. I do freelance writing at CloudAve too. For more information you can access my business card 2.0 over here.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2008. | Permalink

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I would like to thank Michael, for taking time from his busy schedule and answering these questions for our readers and I hope that this will encourage more and more people to start screencasts or create videos on their blogs.

1. Which software do you use or recommend for creating screencasts ?

There are so many great applications to choose from now on both Windows & Mac. I’m Mac-based myself, and have checked out most of the options out there. These days I use a combination of Screenflow from Vara Software, which has some really nice features; and Final Cut for editing the videos down. I think you can get great results from iShowU and iMovie, too though, depending on what you’re looking to do with your screencasts.

On the Windows platform, Camtasia Studio seems to be the way to go – the feature-set is incredible, and while it costs $299, I think it’s possible to download an earlier version for free, for those that aren’t sure. For really simple stuff Jing seems like a quick and easy way to get screencasts made, but the feature set is a long way off that of Camtasia.

2. What sort of other equipments/software you suggest for creating professional looking screencasts ?

I think a lot of people concentrate on the look rather than the sound of a screencast, which can really let them down. For a good overall effect, it pays to make use of some basic sound recording/editing tools and a decent microphone. You don’t need to break the bank, but a USB condenser mic, like those that Samson make for instance, is a good step in the right direction. It can really improve the overall quality of a video if the sound is halfway decent.

For me, my biggest turn-off in a screencast is when people use garish transition effects, or crummy looking animated titles – much better to keep things clean and simple with basic dissolves, clean legible typography and a colour palette that doesn’t hurt your eyes. You can produce these with the standard in-built software in any package, from free editing (open source) tools like Jahshaka, right up to the pro, costly stuff like Adobe Premiere & Apple’s Final Cut suite.

3. I’m sure you must have used many screencast hosting services, do you prefer any one in particular or you think that world already has one YouTube ?

From what I’ve seen of Screencast.com they manage to provide a nice solution for Camtasia and Jing users, and get good results, but I have to say I’ve never used it. For overall quality and it’s high-definition support, Vimeo rates highly in my opinion.

The other option is to self-host, or use a podcasting hosting service like LibSyn. With the h.264 codec you can really compress files down to small sizes and still retain high quality in your videos, so storage and bandwidth isn’t the problem it used to be.

To an extent it depends on your goals – if you want to reach as wide an audience as possible, upload your video to as many places as you can, using a tool like TubeMogul.com. If on the other hand you value crisp, high-definition quality over eyeballs, it still seems best to me to self-host or use LibSyn and set up an RSS feed for your videos so that people can download your screencasts to itunes, Miro or their desktop.

4. How did you learn screencasting ? Do you suggest some resources which should be must read for any new screencaster ?

I picked it up along the way. I studied (and briefly taught) film at uni, and have been editing videos for a while, so when I started screencasting it was possible to transfer some of those skills across I guess. Then, when I worked at Master New Media as a tech blogger, Robin Good – my editor, gave me the chance to experiment with video reviews of the web applications we were exploring.

When I started out there weren’t as many resources as there are now, but I would say in terms of must-read resources the big three for me (and I’m sure I’ll forget some major players here and regret it later) would be Beth Kanter, who has an excellent screencasting primer, wiki stuffed full of information;

John Udell, who I believe coined the term screencasting (or had his readers do so), and Amit Agarwal at Digital Inspiration, who has gathered some excellent resources, software comparisons and a whole lot more besides. For folks interested in Camtasia, I’ve heard great things about Daniel Park’s book on the subject.

5. I would like to once again congratulate you for your employment at Automattic and I’m sure that our readers would love to know that how is your experience at Automattic ?

Thank you, I’m very excited about it. I’ve been made to feel very welcome, and you couldn’t ask for a more interesting bunch of people to work with. Because of the open source roots of the company, and the passion of the people involved, there’s a real feeling of it being a “flat” organization. Everyone there is there because they want to be, and because they’re passionate about contributing to the project. It’s interesting that we’re all scattered over the globe too – a truly virtual company.

What drew me to Automattic (besides the obvious coolness of working with these guys) is the openness to ideas and each person contributing to the bigger picture. I’m really excited about the work we’re going to be doing.

My role there is “Lightbulb Engineer” – the idea being that I’ll be (hopefully) helping to generate lightbulb moments for people – those moments when things suddenly make sense and fall into place. Video is obviously going to play a big part in that process, but won’t be the beginning and end of it. My background is a mixture of video production and education, and I hope to put both to good use with Automattic.

6. As we all know that WordPress is an open source project, so is there anyway that other screencasters, wordpress fans would be able to contribute or help you in creating screencasts ?

It’s early days at the moment, and we have some ambitious projects in mind, but I’d like to think that the huge, passionate WordPress community will be playing a very active role in the content we’ll be putting together. It never fails to amaze me how many great screencasts, tutorials and blogs there are already about WordPress – I’m not sure there are many projects or products with so lively, opinionated and passionate a community. That’s exciting to me.

Beyond that, we have plans to make the (video) content produced in-house as open source as possible – we’re all very passionate about people being able to take the raw material, remix it, translate and otherwise put it to good use. That’s something I’ll be thinking about a lot in the coming months as we roll out a whole lot of video content, and it will certainly be reflected in the licensing.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2008. | Permalink

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