As internet connection speeds get faster and video file sizes get smaller, we’re seeing more and more on-screen training for products and processes that typically would only have a written manual (or nothing at all). This videos are an excellent way to learn a product, especially if you have trouble reading text on a screen or get bored easily. Additionally, videos provide another ‘visual’ layer for people who learn that way.

I recently had my first experience with Lynda.com watching some of their free videos on Illustrator. After watching only a couple of them, I was totally sold. I’m also in the process of making a series of videos showing people how to use a certain functionality of a software program I’m working on. Working with both the consumption end (watching) and production end (making), I’ve learned quite a bit about what works and what doesn’t when recording these on-screen videos. I’ve also learned that they are a lot harder to make than they look.

I want to share a few tips that a colleague and I came up with while making these videos. For reference, we’re using the Camtasia 5 software to record and edit the videos. While it isn’t perfect, there isn’t too much more to ask for and I’m not considering a different solution at the moment. Thanks to Mark Otis for a few of these ideas.

What’s the point?

Video training is a great way to show complicated steps or describe potentially confusing theories. Video training, however, is not great for short, easy tasks. If I wanted to show someone how to recover a file from their recycle bin, it is easier to simply say “open the recylce bin, find the file, drag out of the recycle bin” than it is to make a video.

The point being that not everything lends itself to being taught in a video format. To make a successful video, be sure to think about it from the student’s perspective. Do they gain anything by seeing it on a screen? Are there complicated steps that work better shown than told? Even better, do these types of videos already exist out there? Before you start, it might be a good idea to run a quick Google or Youtube search for your subject matter.

Start with an outline

Off-the-cuff demonstration is VERY difficult to pull off properly. By that I mean it’s pratically impossible to effective teach people without a guide to tell you what is next. Watch a presentation without a clear, concise outline or a script and you’ll notice that the presentation jumps around, misses topics, and ends up somewhat to extremely ineffective.

Even if the video is short, have precise steps to take on-screen available and print out or write down the points you want to make. It is FAR more important to have an effective video than it is to sound casual. Be clear beforehand what you will be showing and communicate that to the viewer within the first ten seconds. Stay on task, follow your outline, and err on the side of conciseness.

Test it out

Take it from someone who spent over four hours just to come out with one six-minute video: test your equipment. It takes 5 or 10 minutes to record a piece, run through the steps, make sure all the necessary files are there, and watch a finished product. This will save you hours! Listen for puffs of air on your “Ps” and “Ts”and adjust the mic accordingly. Make sure that the finished product can be heard clearly and that there are no problems with your powerpoint or the demo software. Produce a video all the way to the end and watch the finished product. Sound problems are the most common issue with on-screen demos and can be very frustrating to someone watching the video. Witha  bit of preparation, you can avoid headaches for yourself and your viewers.

Consider screen resolution

Screen capture video programs let you modify the size of the capture window you are using so if you’re going to shrink the capture size down to a small size, then your resolution is not terribly important. If, however, you’re wanting to capture the entire screen (from, say, a Power Point presentation), you’ll want to modify the size of your screen display (the resolution). To change this in Windows XP, right click on your main desktop window, select Properties, then the Settings tab. Try 800 x 600 first and, if that’s too distracting, then try 1024 x 768. Remember that what it looks like on your screen is different from what it will look like once it is produced. Reducing the screen size will cut down on the raw video file size and make it easier for the program to shrink the size when it is finished.

Turn everything off

Before you start recording, consider EVERYTHING. Is the window open, letting in a lot of noise? Is your IM turned off so you’re not interrupted? Is the background picture on your desktop distracting (or inappropriate)? How about the icons ON your desktop? Is your phone muted? Are there any pop-ups happening? A great way to avoid computer interruptions is to make a new login to your computer and remove everything off of the desktop. In Windows XP, go to Start > Control Panel > User Accounts and create a new user. Then, switch users by going to Start > Logoff and selecting Switch Users, then logging into the new account. Keep this second account “clean” by not installing or logging into any programs that cause interruptions.

Update 8/20:

Smashing Magazine just posted an article about screencasting yesterday… check it out.

This is a guide I wrote a few months back. I have it posted on my homepage and at Squidoo but my homepage is going away in favor of a much simpler system so I wanted to move this. It’s also a bit more visible here, where I’m getting hits, rather than on the homepage, where I’m getting no hits!

If you’re considering whether or not you want to start a blog, ponder this:

By posting a great piece of advice or a guide for someone or your professional insight, you contribute to the incredible equalizing power of the internet. By making once-obscure and restricted information public, you engender a sense of community, a virtual, digital community that pulls people together across geographic and cultural barriers.

Want to be a part of something great? Put yourself out there! But how?

There are many different guides out there offering the best way to write or the easiest way to start or the quickest way to 10K subscribers. You might find some excellent information out there (I have, no doubt) but none of them really tell you how to find and connect with your readers in the most organic, benevolent way possible.

In this post, I offer 6 steps to write a great blog entry for any type of blog you could imagine. These will help you appear more often when real people search, garner more attention from those that matter, and, generally, be more successful as an RSS author. I’m writing these not from the position of a famous blogger (I’m not one of those) but from a chair in front of a monitor that has seen countless posts pass by.

I’m your audience. You better listen up!

1. Understand the format and write to it

While it’s really your blog’s content that determines whether or not I will return, the reach of your blog (meaning the amount of people that see it) makes a big difference in whether I find you in the first place or not. Want me to find you in the seemingly endless ocean of information out there? Then understand and practice the format that makes you findable. Keep these concepts in the forefront of your mind as you write so they start to become second nature. Thinking in terms of a blog post will cut down on the editing time and make it easier in the future to efficiently put out quality material for me to read. The following are a few things to keep in mind.

Your Title Speaks Volumes

The title of your blog post is a very crucial piece of the blog puzzle. With so many aggregators, search engines, and browsers, it’s the only thing that I’ll see and the big decider as to whether I’m going to click it or not. Keep it short, state your purpose, and tell me why I should go there. Great titles reel me in, just don’t disappoint me with a lame post!

It’s All About the First Impression

A great blog post starts with a great introduction. You want me to finish the article and spend as much time on the page as possible, right. Hook me with a great anecdote or a reason why this post will benefit me right now. Help me along to each section and you’ll make a real audience member out of me.

You’re Nothing without your Head

You’ll notice in this article that there is a title at the top, 6 sub-headings, and sub-sub-headings beneath those; this was not an accident. All three of these headers are critical to being seen by the search engines out there (what you want to happen if you want me to find you). Before you write, plan out your main title, your introduction, and all of your sub-headers. This will help you keep on task and make your article as useful as possible. At the end, make sure all of your headers match the information underneath and incorporate the key words you want to be associated with.

2. Consistency: Keep Me Coming Back for More

Think of your blog as your own personal publication, like a magazine or a newspaper. When I subscribe to Time or Newsweek or The Economist I’m not giving them money to send me an issue when they feel like it or when they get around to it. I receive one issue every month/week of a certain size and on a certain set of subjects.

Just like the New York Times can’t skip a few days here or there, your blog must be consistent in how often the posts are being made. This doesn’t mean you need to post twice a day but if you want to post twice a day, make sure you can keep that pace up ad infinitum. I’m more likely to return if you find a schedule that works for you and keep to it; it’s nice knowing that I have something to read on specific days, regardless of what those days are.

Before you start, come to an agreement with yourself and your co-authors (if there are any) on a frequency and stick to it. If you can write six days a week then go for it. If, however, you think you will only have the time or where-with-all or content for twice a week, then pick two days of the week and make sure those days get a post. You will be more successful by posting every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday than you will by writing 7 times one week and once the next.

3. Make Your Content Unique

The internet is a very descriptive name that gives you a good idea of what is going on behind the scenes. It’s a giant network of interconnected information and benefits greatly from layered information on many different topics. For every topic there exists countless different descriptions, opinions, definitions, and alternatives. How can anything be unique when everything already has a website?

It’s certainly daunting to face a blank page and wonder if your thoughts are already out there so don’t. Unless you wrote them, your thoughts haven’t been published so write away.

Unique content comes from the heart and it comes from experience. Maybe one or two (or ten) people already wrote an article about marriage or family relations or earning trust. Maybe there is a whole network of people who write about it all the time but that doesn’t make me more likely to read theirs and less likely to read yours. You might only write a page or two about your topic but it came from YOUR mind and YOUR experience and, as such, is far more important to your audience.

Where people fall into a trap is when they look to other bodies of work to create their own. Referencing other blogs, articles, and web pages is fine but don’t make other people’s work your own (even if you give credit). With so many ways of receiving and filtering information, I certainly don’t need another middle man feeding me other people’s information. Bloggers who fall into the habit of parroting others fall quickly into irrelevancy.

If you write about a book, news article, or blog post that you read, tell me what you think about it. If you agree, tell me why and vice versa. Quote a small piece of the work and tell me what was right or wrong about that passage. Also: always give credit where credit is due.

4. What’s the Point? Ask Often

Most of us like to keep up with family and friends and colleagues to make sure everything is going well. If my mom wrote a blog about her day-to-day activities, I would probably check it out every now and then in between phone calls. But would my friends? Would my co-workers? Would anyone else?

Ask yourself over and over: why am I writing this? If you can’t come up with one or two reasons why, maybe you should re-think the topic. Every post doesn’t have to be a home run and change my life but each post should speak to me and what I want. You are writing for me, not for yourself.

In that vein, it’s important to understand what is important to you and what is important to me. Your experience and your knowledge is why you have the subscribers you do but unless that knowledge is consistently helping me in my life, chances are that I won’t be around for the long haul.

Problogger.com speaks to this point::

Stop writing about yourself. Start solving problems - Surfers become readers when a blog provides something that is wanted. A casual visitor may read your blog because they find training, answers to problems, entertainment, or something else they want. This more than likely will mean that they won’t want to read about you, your girlfriend, your cats, your kids, or your catastrophes (unless you have a personal blog that your friends read). Discontinuing the off-topic posts will help you to develop more repeat traffic and takes exactly 0 minutes to implement.

5. Simple and To-The-Point Language

Ok, here’s the tricky part, picking a font that works. Here are the basic rules:

This particular point is important for those with an extensive vocabulary or those who write about a particular topic with which they are very knowledgeable. It is important to keep jargon and unnecessarily arcane or obscure words from damaging the accessibility of your blog. If you want to appeal to me and all the other me’s out there, it is important that you don’t make me feel uneducated or uninformed. I’m not an idiot but when I fire up Google Reader on my phone and catch a few blog posts on the trolley, I don’t want to have to hunt for a dictionary (that’s what Infinite Jest is for).

Additionally, by using commonplace words (even if you sound a bit repetitive) you are increasing the likelihood that I’ll will find your post through a search engine. Once you’ve had just a bit of experience using a search engine, you realize that being specific is key to finding what you want efficiently.

When you are writing, don’t change what you want to say to fit into a set of words but keep your post direct and avoid unnecessary words. Use short, direct sentences and clear and concise language (this should start to resemble a Strunk & White flashback from your school days). Avoid long tangents that can lose me and make the difference between a returning customer and a bounce.

With a blog post, shorter is better. I have many different blogs I subscribe to and tying up my time with a long-winded post is inconsiderate to say the least. If a particular topic requires more analysis or additional information on your part, consider a multi-part post; you can be sure I’ll come back if I liked the first one. Make sure to plan the series out and tell me what I’m in for.

6. Back It Up

At their best, blogs are charged with providing clear, concise, and CORRECT information. Getting your news from CNN.com is a viable option but I would rather read it from people who were there and saw it happen. Similarly, I would rather read about counseling from a 30 year veteran than just a simple definition on Wikipedia.

The problem with blogs, however, is that each blog has its own reputation to build and maintain. The blog community (called the blogosphere) has done a great job of raising the overall opinion of blogs as information disseminators over the last few years. Your blog will benefit from this but you also have your own work to do.

Make sure that your facts can be backed up and include links wherever possible. Your information is doubly powerful if it is corroborated by a quote from someone or even another blog post. Link out to other site when you can and include short quotes when appropriate.

There is one thing that you won’t be able to source: your own experience. Anecdotes are important in building trust and respect but they must be accurate. A simple exaggeration of a particular experience might seem minor when you write it but if you are ever called out it could be disastrous. Building my trust is paramount to being the most interesting blog writer ever. If the story needs modification to fit the post, you don’t need the story (or the post).

Bonus: Ask yourself these questions as you write

• What am I trying to say? What should the reader be getting out of this?
• Why should the reader care about what I’m writing?
• Am I validating what I’m saying? Are my facts straight?
• Am I including too much personal information?
• Could this be split into several different parts? Am I going on too long?
• Is my title strong enough? Does it accurately explain what I’ve written?
• Do my sub-headings make sense? Do they correctly label what follows?
• Am I considering Seth’s 3 U’s: unique, useful, up-to-date?

I simply don’t have it in me to write a rant about phone-based customer service. Not that I don’t have the time (actually, I don’t) or the patience, I just don’t have the will. Plus, who cares? We all have stories, many of us have worked in the industry and have even more stories from both sides, and I would guess that most people don’t want to stress vicariously.

What I want to do, however, is muse. Maybe I need to get it out to feel better or maybe I think someone with this problem is reading. (Ir)Regardless of the reason, I want to address a conversation I had with a Cox cable technical support rep yesterday.

Let me provide a frame of reference: we just moved into a new (read: much bigger) apartment and had our cable internet moved over. Plugged in the modem+router, no dice. Called Cox at 10:30pm and they answered (that was very refreshing). It was a very mild-mannered (maybe I woke him up) guy who told me that the coax outlet I was using might be bunk. I hung up and tried another outlet; the same thing happened, blinking “Cable” light on the modem. It was probably a hook-up issue so I called in yesterday to get it ironed out.

The gentleman I talked to was friendly but had a need to talk over me… not aggressively, mind you, but consistenly. I’m sure I could use several more adverbs to describe his demeanor/tone but I’ll spare you.

We got to the point where it seemed logical to schedule a technician to come and look at the line. He kindLY stated that there might be an $89 charge if the problem was in the house and not on the outside. I politeLY said that I wanted the building owner to pay that fee if it was deemed necessary. Then he repeatedLY and irrationalLY ignored my request and gave me information that simpLY wasn’t pertinent to the situation.

Flash forward 10+ minutes of this ridiculous back and forth stemming from my desire to have the outside wiring checked but the inside wiring ignored. In the end, my question was answered and my request was possible but only after I got worked up enough to write this and wasted tons of time between the two of us.

*sigh*

So this turned into a rant, I guess, but let’s make something productive out of it. I taught customer service to phone reps for 2 years so here is what I would do on the other end of the phone.

• Listen. Stop talking and listen. Let the customer speak their mind, regardless of what they are saying. You can disarm someone very easily by not talking over them and just letting them get everything out. Don’t interrupt, wait for your turn, and stop sounding like you’re just looking for a gap in between words so you can start blabbing.
• Write.Write down what I say as I say it. Not only will this keep you listening but, when you get confused or it’s your turn to solve the issue, you have a bit of information to work with. If the person I talked to had written down what I said about paying the fee, maybe our conversation could have been 80% shorter.
• Explore. Either with me on the phone or by yourself while I’m on hold, run through all the possible options for the situation and be clear on what they mean. Even if you’re just brainstorming with me, I would rather hear 10 different options that don’t work instead of 1. Chances are that one out of the 10 actually WILL work for me.
• Solve. If I repeat myself eight times then you’re not hearing what my problem is (or I’m trying to hypnotize you). Solve my problem by re-phrasing yourself or repeating back what I said or offering different solutions. If we’re both repeating ourselves then there is something wrong. Since you can’t control the customer, control yourself.

Let’s make the world better one customer problem at a time.

This story started about 2 or 3 years ago in my previous car. When I would burn MP3 CDs (just simple data diss), some songs would play, some would play for a bit and then go blank, some would skip, and some discs wouldn’t even play. I drove me crazy to have a head unit that could play MP3 discs but not actually play the MP3 discs. It started happening out of the blue so I assumed the unit had gone bad and I was out of luck.

Flash forward to last weekend and I stumbled into buying a new-to-me car. It has an MP3 capable head unit and I was excited to start using that feature again. Burned a Wu-Tang disc, brought it with me the next time I was going out, popped it into the player and… SAME PROBLEM. What the hell?

So I bought new/different CDs - same problem. Tried my other burner - same problem. Tried a different software - same problem. Tried a different disc style - same problem. Sometimes they would verify and sometimes they would error out but ALL the time they would not play properly. I was beginning to think that my music collection had gone bad except it played fine on the computer and on an iPod.

It was Google time, in a big way. Here are a few things I found out about burning a CD of any type. It turns out, the solution was easy. All I had to do was…

Turn down the burn speed

Just because your discs say they are capable of burning at a certain speed doesn’t mean they actually are. The Sony discs I bought were rated for up to 48x but, as soon as I turned the speed down to 24x, discs burned great and played just fine in the car. Try a speed much lower than the top speed, like 24x or 12x.

Thanks to Platinum GLS on VWVortex.com

Get rid of nested directories

You would think that a CD player would be able to figure out directories inside of directories but some just can’t. Some of that probably has to do with the fact that most CD players are linear, meaning that they only have forward and back controls, not up and down, so navigation might be a problem. If you are using folders, use them in the root directory only (meaning the “first level” of the file structure) and, just to be sure, if you are using directories, put all the songs in a directory (no songs in the root directory).

Yes

No

Rename long and/or oddly-named files

In addition to nested directories, some players also have problems with certain characters and file name lengths that border on infinite. Get rid of symbols and shorten the name a bit to make sure that your player can read and display the name. Some burning software will actually rename the file but that doesn’t always mean that your play can play them.

Yes

No

Update your driver firmware

Firmware is software that resides within hardware to instruct it how to function and how to run commands sent by your computer. If your burner is over a year old, there might be a firmware update to download and install. This sounds technical but it shouldn’t be that hard. Go to the website of the manufacturer of your burner and search for updates, find your model number, download and install.

Memory problems - not enough or going bad

It’s unlikely that the first problem you would encounter with bad memory on your computer would be burning a CD but stranger things have happened. Run a memory checker (like Memtest86+), just in case. It’s more likely that maybe you’re doing a little too much multi-tasking during your burn sessions. Surf the web, write a letter, or plan your next CD but leave your Photoshop, Crysis, and Maya3D applications closed. It is possible to overrun your burning buffer and affect the data that is written.

Finalize your CDs

MP3 players don’t like “multi-session” discs (when you can add data later) so make sure to finalize the CD. Every burn program should have this option available.

Defragment your hard drive

But you do that regularly anyways, right?

On an XP machine, go to Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Defragmenter. Make sure to run it when you won’t be working on your computer, like overnight. I’d recommend doing this once per quarter or more frequently if you move files around a lot.

As a side-note, the disk defragmenter icon is probably one of my most favorite icons of all time. Yes, I have favorite icons.

Yes

Still not working? Here’s more options for you

Here is a great list of things to try from Acoustica.
Here is a whole site dedicated to helping you solve this little problem.

Hoped that helped!