I'd Rather Be Writing » brooks andrus

Adding the Human Element in Screencasts

Tom Johnson — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 15:28:39 +0000

Brooks Andrus has a good post and video about including the human element in screencasts. Brooks writes:

Screen video alone is not enough. You need to humanize your content by getting in front of the camera and engaging your audience. And no, I’m not talking about long-winded monologues either. Several 5-7 second talking-head elements can go a long way toward winning over and maintaining the interest of your audience. Let people see your face and don’t be afraid to be emotive / loose. Let them see the twinkle in your eyes and the smirk on your face. As social creatures its how we empathize and bond with each other.

Brooks starts his videocast just this way. He gets in front of the camera.

Brooks makes some other good points as well, such as shifting camera angles every 2-8 seconds to keep the audience’s attention. But I want to focus on this opening personal element a bit.

Last week, after posting about the Harrison Clarity videos, some people at Microsoft called me to get some feedback on other experimental videos. Here are some of the videos they wanted me to watch:

While I was relaying feedback about the videos, I realized how much I enjoyed the human element at the beginning. I like to know who’s talking to me, so I can visualize them. It’s more personal and friendly to include a talking person at the start. It puts the appeal of the video on an entirely new level.

A while ago I tried incorporating a talking head at the beginning of a screencast, and I found out that Camtasia Studio can’t accept a camcorder as an input device. It can only accept a web cam. With web cams, the speed usually isn’t good enough to keep the mouth in sync with the words, so it looks poor.

I believe the correct way to integrate a talking head is to record it with a videocamera, export the file as an AVI, and insert the AVI into a Camtasia Studio timeline (or some other application).

Scott Skibell also includes the personal element at the start of his screencasts. Here’s a screencast on microphone comparisons that is worth watching.

Scott Skibell starts his screencasts with a personal element as well

The only problem with including a human element at the start is that it seems much more difficult to pull off. First, you have to make sure you look all right for the camera. You then have to set up the video camera, lighting, and environment. You have to figure out how to connect a microphone to your video camera (I’m guessing an expensive lapel mic? not sure). You either have to memorize your lines or get a good feel for what you plan to say. Reading it from a screenreader isn’t going to work, I’m guessing (here’s an example where it seems like the person is reading from a screen). You then have to extract the footage, convert it to another format and integrate into your software program. When you add all of this extra time in, I’m betting that the number of screencasts you actually record plummets.

However, in a web environment, maybe this desire for professional cinema is overkill. Maybe the “reality” camera that catches you unshaven, in a messy house, with wandering kids, ringing phones, mediocre lighting, and an unrehearsed script — but in a real situation — is even more appealing because it is transparent and authentic. I need to try it.

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Why Is It Important for Video Tutorials to Be User-Led?

Tom Johnson — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 07:34:41 +0000

I recently spent 10 days in Florida visiting my family and giving a couple of presentations to the STC-Suncoast and STC-Orlando chapters on blogging. You can hardly take a family of kids to Florida without going to Disneyworld and Seaworld, so we did that as well.

In case you’re unaware of the cost of theme parks, prices are enough to bring on a cold sweat and tremor. (Thanks to some friends, one park was free.) After we completed our four day theme park immersion (Seaworld x 2, Disneyworld, and Busch Gardens), we took life a little more slowly and went to the Fort DeSoto beach.

While my kids were digging in sand and collecting seashells, I dared to ask whether they would rather spend a day at the beach or a day at Disneyworld.

Their answer? Unanimously, they said the beach. I even asked them multiple times on different occasions. Always the same answer: the beach, Dad. We would rather go to the beach and collect seashells.

The interesting question is why. Why do kids prefer the beach to Disneyworld? I think the answer is wrapped up in the phrase “child-led.”

What child-led means

My sister is a proponent of child-led parenting. I was first introduced to the idea when we went on a walk along a trail near Timpanogos Cave in Utah. Rather than pull her kids along or push them in a stroller, my sister preferred to follow her children, allowing them to explore what they wanted and go at their own pace. Given that she has a one and three year old, we moved at about .01 miles per hour.

She later added that child-led parenting doesn’t mean you let your children do whatever they want without rules. Instead, her model of child-led parenting is to allow the children to make decisions and determine their course of action by themselves (to some extent).

Some examples of non-child-led activities might be letting your children watch TV or parading them around rides at a theme park. In both cases, the child is floored by the external stimuli, not making decisions on his or her own but rather sitting back and letting someone else drive the input and thought.

In contrast, on the beach, the activity is much more child-led. The child drives the activity all the way, deciding where to dig in the sand, how deep, whether to build a castle or not. The child decides whether to wade deep or shallow in the water, to run from waves or into waves, whether to dance around or stand still. The child decides what seashells to collect, how many to put in his or her bucket, how to arrange them, which ones to keep, and so on.

In child-led activities, the child makes a ton of decisions about how he or she wants to do an activity. The activity doesn’t drive the child. The child’s choices drive the activity.

If child-led activities are more engaging to children than other types of activities, is there such a thing as user-led documentation? Most written documentation is more or less user-led, because the user must decide which topic to read, how long to read it, and how to navigate the content.

But when it comes to video tutorials, long narrations quickly tire the audience. Why is that? The same reason my kids prefer the beach over Disneyworld: most videos are not user-led.

Should cinema be the focus?

I recently read a good post by Brooks Andrus on combining cinematography with video tutorials. He mentioned incorporating a variety of cinematic techniques to keep the audience’s attention. Brooks writes,

How can we make screencasts more engaging? What can we learn from the masters of visual literacy, cinematographers, about pacing, depth, emotion and visual narrative? These sorts of questions are important to explore if we want people to engage with, learn from and, dare I say, enjoy our screencasts. That’s the mindset I think we need to establish for screencasting. We’re not just recording the screen, we’re telling a story and there is a well established historical record of the art and science behind motion picture narratives.

I agree with Brooks on the importance of story. And I certainly welcome the integration of cinema with screencasting. But no matter how good you make the video — even if you make the video as cool as a Disneyworld ride — your viewer is still going to be bored if the video is not user-led.

The direction we should take with video, then, is not so much moving into the domain of cinema. It should be to make the videos a user-led experience.

Some concrete ideas

Exactly how does one make a user-led video? Here are a few ideas that come to mind.

Present the user with learning options in the middle of the video (branching).
Provide users with a let-me-try experience at the end of the video.
Keep the videos short (30 seconds to 2 minutes) so that you allow the user to click and watch the segment of the video he or she wants.
Require the user to perform some actions during the video or at the end (like homework).
Make the videos into more of a choose-your-own adventure.
Provide periodic quizzes during the video.

User-led is a concept that I’m going to be thinking more about in the upcoming months as I create videos for my documentation projects. If you have any tips or thoughts on creating more of a user-led experience, please let me know.

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Embedding HD Quality Screencasts in Your Blog

Tom Johnson — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 02:10:57 +0000

If you’ve ever uploaded a screencast into a video sharing site, such as Youtube, you’ll notice that the screen quality is poor. Screencasts require a high degree of clarity to be watchable. For example, here’s a screencast I uploaded to Youtube. It’s hard to see what’s going on.

Other video sharing sites have the same problem. Here’s the same video on Viddler.

And here’s the same video on Vimeo.

Unlike the other video sharing sites, Vimeo also provides an HD version. At first I was excited about Vimeo, because the HD version is pretty clear in the compressed form. To see what I’m talking about, watch this same video on Vimeo’s site.

Pretty clear, right?

Now, here’s the catch. To embed the HD version of the video on your own site, you have to upgrade to Vimeo Plus for $59.95 a year. Then you only get 5,000 embedded plays, which means only 5,000 people can watch the HD video embedded onto your site, or one user can watch it 5,000 times. You can buy more embedded plays for more money. For example, you can buy 100,000 embedded plays for $199, which isn’t that much. But still, the costs start to add up. This is already about $260 — each year.

And of course if you’re embedding HD video, you’ll need an HD camcorder, which is another $600 (for a low-end version).

Even if you go to all this trouble, the HD embedded screencasts you post on your blog might not be so viewable at a width of 550 pixels, which is about my blog’s post width. The text will be miniature, and users will want to expand it anyway. To make it viewable at this width, you’ll probably end up relying on the pan and zoom features in Camtasia Studio. As soon as you start adding in the pan and zooms and other post-production processing, creating that simple screencast jumped from about a 5 minute operation to an hour. After a few screencasts, you’ll tell yourself you don’t have time for screencasting.

There’s a much better way to create screencasts: Jing and Screencast.com.

Here’s a sample screencast embedded with Jing.

In the compressed form, the text is hard to see, similar to the other video players. However, if you click the expand button (see image below), the player expands to show perfect pixel clarity, unlike the other video services. It also darkens the background, giving you more of a movie-viewing experience.

Brooks Andrus, one of the Jing developers, created a tutorial on how to embed Jing videos into WordPress blogs. You have to change a few parameters in the default screencast.com embed code to make it play in WordPress, but it only takes 10 seconds to change this. (It’s a bug they’re fixing.)

With both Jing Pro and Camtasia Studio, you can also capture HD quality screencasts. Just record a dimension of at least 1280 x 720 pixels. If you increase that size, maintain the same 4:3 aspect ratio. Choose the MPEG4 output (only available in Jing Pro). In both Jing Pro and Camtasia, the video output will be encoded with the H.264 codec. If you were to upload such a video to Vimeo, or embed it with the Jing wrapper as I explained above, the video would appear in HD quality.

You don’t have to use Screencast.com with Jing. Brooks also shows you how to FTP the video to your own site and embed the screencast with the Kimili flash embed plugin. This solution is useful if you want to maintain tighter control over your content.

I’ve been experimenting with Vimeo and other video-sharing services for the past couple of days. Overall, I’m pretty sold on the Jing/Screencast.com solution (or the Jing wrapper solution), for the reasons I explained in this post (cost, clarity, screen real estate). Jing and Screencast.com are also in their development infancy, so who knows, they may be working on more HD features similar to Vimeo right now anyway.

Do you agree with my analysis of screencasting solutions ? Are you embedding screencasts a different way? I’d like to hear your thoughts.