In this update:

• The First Screencaster Hotseat, where I get out the ol’ red pen and critique a user-submitted screencast.
• Free financing for the upcoming July Boot Camp sessions – don’t let price get in your way! Come to Orlando with no upfront tuition cost.

Fanny to the Fire! Pop a Squat on the
Screencasting Hotseat…

To my knowledge, no university offers a degree in screencasting (I know, I couldn’t believe it, either). Most folks fall into it from other professions. I was actually a theatre major in college, taking a string of acting, improvisation, and directing classes to hone my thespian skills. Unlike most college courses, where you participate in class, write papers, and get a critique and final grade in written form from a professor, the feedback we got was a bit more direct. You did your scene, and everyone, students and profs alike, publicly picked it apart.

It was not for the thin-skinned.

But if you could get through the process without breaking down in tears (which did actually happen to a few people), and let the good folks shine a light on your mistakes and bad habits, a remarkable thing ended up happening.

You got better.

A few weeks ago, I made an offer to the denizens of The Screencaster to submit their own videos and let me dissect them for y’alls education and enjoyment. About a dozen of you answered the call. A gentleman named Joe Madden submitted a video (his first, actually) on how to upload documents to Google Drive. It was a great freshman effort, and I found a lot to like about it as well as some things that could be improved. This 10-minute critique is not only worth Joe’s time, but yours as well…

And don’t forget to keep submitting, and I’ll continue picking out videos to pick on.

Camtasia Training with No Money Down.
Introducing Free Financing.

At my last Boot Camp session, I took an informal poll of the attendees, and was blown away to discover that more than half of them attending the session on their own nickel. You could have knocked me over with a feather.

Listen, I have mad respect for people who value their continuing professional education, and especially for those who invest their own funds in the process. It got me thinking about how to make the courses a bit more palatable for those who were paying their own way.

About a year ago, we abandoned our “traditional” merchant account and got ourselves set up with Paypal Pro instead. They have empowered me to offer free financing for all Boot Camp sessions. Just book the course, and you have six full months to pay it off with NO interest whatsoever.

Technically, you could sign up, attend, and if you discovered that it wasn’t the bee’s knees, get a full refund, effectively without having paid a cent other than your own travel costs. It’s a rare provider who would state this explicitly, but I’m so confident that we are the bee’s knees that I’m inclined to scream it from the rooftops.

To take advantage, all you have to do is check out from our shop via Paypal, and choose the Bill Me Later option. You do NOT have to be a current Paypal user to take advantage of this.

You can get more information about the program by clicking the banner below. You can get more information about the Boot Camps by clicking one of these buttons:

[button link=”http://www.dappertext.com/camtasia-studio-8-boot-camp/” color=”#FCA21A”]BOOT CAMP INFO[/button]

 

Questions? Concerns? Respectful disagreement? Sound off in the comments below…

 

At our last boot camp session, I had students who got to talking about “set it and forget it” tools for presenting sexy slideshow material. The topic of Animoto and its various clones inevitably came up. These sites promise easy video results, and on the surface, they provide just that.

I even read a forum post about a year ago by a fellow screencaster who was concerned about this, wondering how professional screencasters are supposed to compete with a-few-clicks-and-done.

I don’t blame a beginning screencaster only just embarking on his career to be concerned about being replaced by a robot, but I do get exasperated at clients who fall into this trap.

They see Animoto vids, and they hear the pulse-pounding techno soundtrack, and take in the sexy, rapidfire, almost seizure-inducing visuals. Then they contact me saying “Oooh! We want that!”

Well, no you don’t. Dummy.

Another screencaster acquaintance of mine, Lon Naylor, has this motto that he puts on his site that’s a take-off on the old “Friends don’t let friends drink and drive” ad campaign, but he says “Friends don’t let friends make crappy videos.” Which is engaging and cute, but I think most clients (and even most providers) fall short of really considering what truly makes for a crappy video.

When you ask most people, they immediately zero in on the technical. Bad audio, fuzzy visuals, no niceties like callouts and zooms and captioning. And all those things are certainly considerations, but they don’t make or break a screencast.

My definition of a crappy screencast is a lot simpler. It’s a video that does not do the  job you commissioned it to do. Training videos that are not pedagogically sound, that do not adhere to a set of basic established principles of educational multimedia, and how people best learn with multimedia. Marketing videos without a rock-solid unique selling proposition. That are essentially a dry list of features rather than a solid hook at the beginning, followed by a series of tangible, real world benefits. Knocking out the common objections and guiding the viewer ever so gently toward the sale, culminating in a call-to-action, a dynamite offer that leaves ’em smacking their forheads and reaching for their wallets.

Animoto and their ilk can’t give you this. Neither can a human screencaster who only brings to the table a rudimentary technical knowledge of making screencasts.

Makers of screencasting software, like TechSmith and Telestream, sell people this notion that anybody can make a screencast, and from a technical perspective, that’s true. But unless you have didactic or persuasive abilities to go along with that, you’ll be relegated to making ineffective screencasts, and they won’t get any better at their jobs regardless of how much you pretty them up.

When people ask what I do for a living, I always say “professional screencaster,” and then prepare for the inevitable confused looks. But I’m realizing that it’s not entirely accurate, that maybe I’ve positioning myself wrong all this time. That I’m not a “screencaster” with a capital S. I’m a trainer. I’m a copywriter and a marketer. And I happen to “work in” screencasting the way a painter works in oils or watercolor.

There are going to be those clients who already have those elements figured out (or at least think they do), but even if you really do know what you’re doing, it’s always beneficial to get an outside set of eyes on it. Sometimes you’re too close to a project and its product to see the forest for the trees. These folks will potentially get turned off by this value-add, and the corresponding bump in price that comes with it. But that’s fine. Because those projects where I’m expected to be a “multimedia monkey” whose exclusive focus is on the technology aren’t interesting to me, anyway. I like to get my hands dirty with higher-level thinking.

So you get good at this other stuff, and establish a core baseline of competence. The next level, which I’m only just getting into, is where things get really exciting.

And it’s an exciting time to be in screencasting. The future of the screencasting industry in my opinion lies in the quantative, lies in measuring your success. Now web metrics is a discipline that has been around for years, and it’s now just starting to come into its own on the video side. And it’s actually even more interesting (read: useful) than general web metrics. For example, with a piece of web copy, you don’t really have a way to knowing what the user was reading when they bought, or when they bailed. But because video is comparatively much more linear, it’s easy to know, down to the second, the exact moment when the user got turned on (or off). That’s incredibly powerful information.

Something I’ve been playing around with is this notion of “iterative screencasting,” where you’re making incremental improvements to a screencast, and even split testing its effectiveness against earlier videos. Now, this is obviously more feasible for marketing videos than for training. But it’s often amazing how little changes can make a big difference, not just for the screencast in itself, but as a part in your overall sales funnel.

Do YOU measure your results? Sound off here, and let us know what software and systems you use.

How to add a little concentrated WOW to your work,
with a minimum of cost and hassle

A little while back, I let you in on my most trusted sources for procuring clip art and other stock imagery. Some of you were kind enough to leave a few comments with tips of your own. Today we shift to the audio side of the equation. It’s possible that you want to kick up the professionalism of your video by a notch or two. Or maybe you just want to break up the crushing monotony of your own voice droning on for minutes on end. Screencast background music can be just the ticket.

You’ve got an ocean of possibilities here. Perhaps you want music throughout, or perhaps just a stinger and a tag (music only during the intro & outro segments). Do you want a frenetic, high-energy piece, or something subtle and laid back? I get a lot of students (& clients) asking me about where I find my music.

Unlike my image collection process, where I use an eclectic range of sources, I’ve got ONE source for my audio. Uno. Eins. I have only one source for only one reason. I’ve never had cause to look elsewhere.

The quality is choice. The cost is reasonable. And there are some serious time-saving and mood-enhancing advantages you simply can’t get anywhere else. I’ll explain.

Background Music with SmartSound

For my money, there’s no better music source than SmartSound.com for screencast background music. They’ve got thousands of high-quality, royalty-free tracks on offer that you can buy and use however you like. These tracks can be picked up individually, or with other thematically-related tracks on albums. While appealing, this isn’t a significant departure thus far from any of the other major music sources out there. Where SmartSound really shines is in the way its musical library is structured. Most of its musical works are coded in a multi-layered, highly customizable format. This format is designed to work with its propriety Sonicfire Pro software. This offers the following advantages over standard musical libraries:

• Your musical selection can be set to any length. This alone is worth the cost of admission. Most libraries offer a particular selection in several lengths, usually something like 0:30, 1:00, and 3:00. This often means that you have to meticulously cut several versions together to get the piece to exact length you need, which is incredibly time-consuming. And unless you’re a pretty skillful editor, this Frankenmusic simply won’t sound right. But with SmartSound, you just drag the piece out the desired length, and the score is automatically rewritten to correspond to that length. No more weird cuts. No more fading music in and out to cover up the fact that your chosen piece was too long. I can’t tell you how much time this has saved me.
• Instruments can be individually turned on or off. You can customize sections of your score with different collections of instruments. Want to do a musical segue that only features percussion? With SmartSound, you can.
• Each track comes with multiple “moods.” Every musical piece features several moods, and you can specifically time these to synchronize with what’s happening your video. For example, if your screencast has a money shot, a special “ta-da!!!” moment that you really want to stress, you can crank up the mood to correspond to it. Now, the background music isn’t just “playing in the background.” It’s an active, accurate reflection of what the viewer is watching. It’s as if a Hollywood composer custom-wrote your score. You can even add “hits” at specific points (such as a cymbal crash) to drive a particular point home.

And for all this, the cost is pretty reasonable. Individual tracks start around $30-40, and full albums (usually around ten tracks or so) are usually $99. But they run special deals all the time, and they also offer some pretty radical volume deals that can make purchasing in bulk a real money-saver. The SonicFire Pro software costs $100, but it does include the Core Foundations starter album. Also,  if you pick up a five-album music pack (any 5 albums you choose) for $250, they’ll throw in the software for free. If you want to go whole hog, you spend $450 and get 20 albums, with a whole year to pick out the exact ones you want.

Finally, as an alternative to using the SonicFire software, they sell special plugins that give you all the SmartSound functionality right within non-linear editors, like Premiere, After Effects, Final Cut, and Avid. Man, what a boon it would be to my workflow if I had access to this toolset from within Camtasia Studio’s timeline (you listening, TechSmith?).

For the record, I should state that I have no affiliate relationship with SmartSound, and do not stand to benefit financially or otherwise by plugging their toolset. I’m just a very satisfied customer.

What do you think, Screencasters? Have you tried out the SmartSound system yet? Sound off on your experiences in the comments section below. Likewise, if you use another system you really love, let us know about it…