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…

How do you make a screencast look its absolute best, even if you’re not a designer?

Project Assets that are Accessible to Everyone

The application ain’t free, but once you own Camtasia Studio (and you should), the media assets are.

2. Callouts.com. This is a newer service created by my friend Peter Gillberg over at softwarecasa.com. He’s launched a dynamite subscription-based service with hundreds of animated backgrounds and other callout graphics that you can download and use on an unlimited, royalty-free basis.

Finally, how about some completely FREE stock video clips? There are a ton of sites out there purporting to provide free project assets for any purpose, be it personal or commercial, but there’s usually a catch. Sometimes they show premium ($) images first. Sometimes they make you credit the source or jump through other hoops. Here are three sites that I like, because their selection is decent (and expanding), and their stuff is readily accessible without making you deal with a lot of other garbage:

Coverr – beautiful, free videos, and they add seven more every week.

Pexels – great stock vids in several different categories. They have a free stock photo site, too.

Vidsplay – some ads, but the videos are high-quality and easy to access.

I don’t often talk about my personal life on the dappertext list and site, but I felt somehow compelled to open up to you about something. I want to tell you about my summer.

The incredibly handsome young man over here on the right is my son Rubén. He just turned ten. At a year and a half, he was diagnosed with moderate to severe autism. Of course, we knew before anyone in a white coat ever confirmed it. As a baby, Rubén was a beautiful, smiley boy who flirted with strangers and sought your attention. At around a year of age, however, the smiles began to fade. People became like furniture to him, mere obstacles in his path. The couple of words he possessed disappeared, and wouldn’t return for some time.

I’ll never forget the endless nights I spent lying awake and silently mourning the boy I thought would be lost to me forever. After bringing him back to the U.S. for treatment, we got the official diagnosis, and it became real. At that point, we made the conscious decision to stow our self-pity, and to get busy.

Thus began a parade of speech therapists, diets, vitamins, probiotics, and various other interventions, both therapeutic and biomedical. It hasn’t been easy. My son is also what is known in the world of autism intervention as a “tough nut.” Some kids, with the right interventions, can glide right off the spectrum in a matter of months. For us, it’s been a grueling inch-by-inch battle, complete with occasional scary regressions, mystery rashes, intermittent sensory problems, and chronic “gut issues” (I won’t gross you out with the details on that one).

As you can probably imagine, this takes quite a toll, not only your mental and spiritual energy, but also on your pocketbook. By just about anyone’s standard’s (except maybe Donald Trump’s), dappertext LLC does reasonably well for a one-person company. But that doesn’t keep me from feeling the burn when these various interventions cost upwards of $25K per year. Luxuries like vacations, nicer cars, fine clothes, etc., have had to go by the wayside. Still we dreamt of bringing in better income, not so we could afford the cars and clothes, but so we could afford to do more for Rubén. Anything to make him better.

In the spring of this year, I managed to sign a couple of lucrative new clients, enabling us to finally make the big push we had always dreamed of. Our first stop was Boston, where we had him scoped from top to bottom by one of the world’s leading pediatric gastroenterologists. Then it was down to Florida, visiting his biomedical autism doc for six weeks. First there were more tests, followed by some targeted, aggressive interventions. I won’t disclose details about these, as I don’t want to give the remotest perception that I’m doling out medical advice to anyone. But suffice to say that these interventions were indicated by either clinical observation, his personal lab results, or both.

The result for this tough nut has been remarkable. A flurry of little improvements which, taken collectively, add up to A LOT. Worth every penny we spent, and more. To wit:

• Better speech. He now says longer sentences, and constructs them less laboriously.
• Better (more emotive) inflections in his speech. The flat, monotone affect so common among spectrum kids is now reduced.
• Lovely pretend play (also a major problem with spectrum children), using his stuffed animals to put on puppet shows.
• He’s increasingly seeking out play and interaction with me and his mother, and appropriately answering questions.

I know these seem like very small things, especially for those with neurotypical kids. But for us they’re HUGE. It gives me confidence that even an older spectrum child can still progress.

So why am I telling you all this? For two reasons. For one, I’m a proud pappy who wants to shout my son’s accomplishments from the rooftops, particularly in light of the light of the fact that there hasn’t been anything much to shout about in some time.

I’m also telling you because I’m getting an increasing number of calls and e-mails (most very diplomatically worded — a couple of them, not so much) inquiring as to the status of the Camtasia Studio 8: The Definitive Guide. Because this trip was largely an impromptu one, it required shifting my schedule around, and the book would therefore be seeing release significantly later than what I had been telling people. And I guess I just felt you were owed a more detailed explanation than the usual family issues blah blah personal time blahbitty blah. Please believe that I’m looking forward to its release every bit as much as you are. I very rarely say this about an emergent business issue, but I simply had more important things to take care of this summer.  🙂

Rest assured that it is still on track on for release in the near future. Part of the hold-up has been moving the whole thing to a newer, more stable authoring platform (specifically InDesign). The book will now release as an industry-standard interactive PDF. No more proprietary viewers, no more text that doesn’t scale (a big complaint among my senior audience), and no more cross-platform issues. I think you’ll be pleased. As always, Screencaster subscribers will be immediately alerted when I release it into the wild.