Evangelism Reps Training Program/How to prepare a screencast: Difference between revisions

*Get yourself a headset -  the main reason is that your voice will be much clearer and you don't have the issue of the mic recording feedback or outside noises like keyboard clicks. I use the [http://www.plantronics.com/us/product/audio-655-dsp Plantronics 655], which is affordable and comfy to wear. Mozilla also gave out headsets to people at the all-hands.  

*Turn off any social media channels and email clients on your computer - you don't want any instant notifications popping up on the screen. You record now, this is all that should go on.

*Have a script ready that you want to follow - this includes what you want to talk about and to have all the things open that you want to show. Loading times of apps and sites you want to show in your screencast is wasted time.

*Be prepared to record a few times as you will get stuck from time to time. You can stitch together one screencast from various steps.

*Take breaks - don't try to record everything at once. When you are ready with one section, pause recording, have a sip of coffee or a walk and then come back - you'll sound much fresher.

*Speak clear and at a moderate pace. There is nothing more frustrating than a screencast where the presenter mumbles or is too fast to follow

*You can record the screencast and then record your audio - in a lot of cases this will have better results

*Plan your screencast and show only what is needed. Screencasts should follow a few rules

**Be short - nobody wants to listen to hours of talk. If you can keep it under 3 minutes - win. You can also cut up longer topics into several screencasts

**Be indexed - you should offer time stamps for people to jump to when covering a few topics so that more advanced viewers can, for example, skip basics

**Be easy to watch - remember that not everybody will see the screencast fullscreen, but embedded. Thus use a larger font size in your editor and make examples that don't rely on low contrast or pixel-precision. Especially video conversion will blur a lot

**Be relevant - show what can be done, not what people need to set up to get there - this could be accompanying text info.