What makes a good screencast?

December 3, 2008 11:11 AM

What are some good screencast examples? And what makes a good screencast anyway?

We're producing a series of screencasts for a piece of software we developed at work. Our audience will be low to moderately savvy computer users, so we'll not only be explaining our software, we'll need to make sure we don't take too much for granted regarding base knowledge of computer skills. Language will also be a complication since people from many countries will be viewing the screencast and for many, English will be a second language (we may at a later date do multi-language versions but for right now only able to do English).

As we've started creating our screencasts we're struggling to find the right balance between just showing the steps necessary to accomplish specific tasks with the software and making it watchable. The "just the facts" style seems choppy, disjointed and difficult to follow. A more wordy style runs the risk of being too challenging to non-english speakers and muddles the real message (how to operate the software).

To help us resolve these issues we're looking for good screencasts and I wanted to turn to the hive-mind for help. Previous questions have addressed software, but I'm concerned more with style.

What are good examples of screencasts you have found?

Are there stylistic rules of thumbs or guidelines regarding length/chattiness/text on screen, that we should be aware of?

What makes screencasts watchable and informative in your mind?

posted by cptspalding to computers & internet (4 comments total)

Jon Udell (an early screencaster) has a nice one on the Heavy Metal Umlat. In fact he keeps a set of del.icio.us bookmarks on the topic.

Fiddler, the web debugging tool, has some nicely composed video demonstrations.
posted by mmascolino at 11:35 AM on December 3, 2008

There are some superb screencasts on Adobe Photoshop, Blender 3D and other graphics software on YouTube. Lots of good use of indicators, highlighting, narration and annotation can be found there. Rip off whatever you like from those.

What sort of software is it, so someone might be able to give you specific pointers?
posted by ostranenie at 1:34 PM on December 3, 2008

At this year's Special Libraries Association conference, I attended a good presentation on screen-captures, specifically using Captivate.

http://www.slideshare.net/edmetz1/sla-captivate

You're probably a more sophisticated user than the audience the session was geared for, but I got a lot out of it.
posted by librarianamy at 2:22 PM on December 3, 2008

ostranenie: It's an add-on to Excel that allows you to map data from an Excel spreadsheet in Google Earth. So we're looking to produce a general tutorial and some FAQ's.

As for YouTube -- I've done searches there and found many, many screencasts but that's part of the problem out of the thousands of screencasts, some are better than others, while others are barely watchable. I'm hoping people can point me to some examples from around the web that they've run across and thought were useful. Partly just to speed up the learning process but partly so I can get a sense of what people like and what works. I have my own ideas of what I like and think is useful, but my tastes may not match everyone else's.

For instance, here's one from Brown University on Making Charts in Excel I thought was quite good and is similar to what we're doing.

librarianamy: We're using captivate, so I knew many of the technical things presented, but some of the tips were actually quite helpful -- thanks for passing it on.

As for the Jon Udall links from mmascolino, they were not exactly what I was looking for. I didn't watch them all, but the ones I did seem to be just aural versions of a blog entry or column. I enjoyed them, but not quite what I need.
posted by cptspalding at 5:14 PM on December 3, 2008