Evangelism Reps Training Program/How to prepare a screencast

Preparation

• 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 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.

Recording tools

Screenr

If you don't want to install anything, you can use screenr to record a screencast on any computer. Screenr is a Java Applet that allows you to define a part of the screen to record and gives you five minutes of screencast time. It can record the audio from your microphone, too. You sign up with Twitter and the videos are hosted on screenr.com for embedding. You can also download the MP4 and directly send it to YouTube.

The downside of Screenr is the five minute limit, that you can not edit the final screencast and that you need to crop a certain part of the screen rather than have a full screen recording that can be cropped and shifted afterwards. You can stop and start the recording though.

iShowU

ishowu is a very minimalistic screen recorder for mac that allows you to define a section of the screen and follow the mouse cursor. For $20 is it pretty cheap and does the trick.

Screenflow (recommended)

Screenflow is very much worth the $99 it costs. As you can see in the demos on how to us it it records the whole screen and you can then crop to what you need. You have several tracks to edit and shift and you can annotate your screencast and have effects to transition in between sections of it. Screenflow exports to YouTube or various local formats. I really got to like screenflow as it also allows you to edit other video and images into your screencasts easily.