Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you this fine day?
Me?
I’m really looking forward to today’s demo because you have told me in the YouTube
channel that you’re very interested in learning more about screencasting, which is awesome
because I love screencasting.
I’ve been doing it for the better part of 30 years, I think.
I might be the oldest living screencaster on the planet because back in the early ‘90s
when I did my first TV shows, we actually pioneered a technique for shooting the computer
screen and getting rid of the hum bar.
We actually built special video cards so that we could zoom in on the menus and things like
that.
So I’ve been screencasting for a very, very long time but never has it been easier than
it is right now.
I’ll show you how I create these sorts of videos and how you can do screencasting and
what’s involved in basic screencasting today on DottoTech.
So here’s the plan today.
Let’s take a look at how screencasting works, the basic building blocks of screencasting
and what the software looks like when you dive in.
Now I’m going to be showing you here on my Mac using the software that I used to create
my show, every episode that I create of this particular video series.
I use a program called Telestream Screenflow and I’ve just upgraded to version 5 so for
a lot of you if you have looked at Screenflow, this is the first time that you’ll see Screenflow
5.
This software is an amazing deal.
It’s $99 if you buy it which is just phenomenal.
Now there are good competitive products.
In the Windows world, you’re going to want to look at a product called Camtasia and there
are also a few other web-based tools that are available and some other screencasting
options that you have out there but they all work pretty much the same as Screenflow is
going to work.
First of all, we have to think about what the building blocks of a screencast are.
Screencasts include audio almost always.
They include recording the screen itself, the computer screen.
So you can be recording a slideshow if you just have your slides to play back.
You can be recording software demos like I do in my channel.
If you’re a teacher or instructor, you can be showing like a blackboard type environment
which is great for doing what they call now the flip classroom.
For a math teacher, showing and teaching you how to do all of the different equations and
all of the different stuff that students can watch in the evening as their homework and
then when they come into the school the next day, the teacher can actually coach them through
just solving all the problems and give them personal help rather than spending time at
the blackboard and instructing it.
It’s an awesome concept.
So anything that you can get on the computer screen, you can record by screencasting.
Now in my style of screencasting, I add a video layer, this video layer that you see
of me talking.
I’m basically talking to a web cam which is set up on my computer.
You can use built-in cameras in the computer.
You can also shoot the video separately and then import it and marry it to the screencast
if you want layer which is a syncing process.
It’s a little bit more work but it works just fine.
One of the beauties of the software that I’m using here which I’ll be showing you in
a minute is as we’re recording, it syncs everything together.
It records the audio, the video and the screen all at the same time so it gives us a nice
package that we can work with.
The first part is the screen, the second part is the video and the third part is the audio.
Now I’ve got a nice, kick-ass microphone and audio setup in here.
You can use everything from your built-in microphone that’s built into your computer,
you can use a headset microphone like you’ve got from your smartphone or you can go to
a USB or in my case here I’ve got a pro version microphone that actually goes through
a mixer board.
It doesn’t matter what you choose.
Well, it matters because the quality should be as good as you could possibly make but
there are a variety of ways to get the audio portion of the screencast together.
Now once you pull all of those different pieces together, the software can then record what
it is that you’re presenting.
Now I’m going to just take you over to a screencast that I’m actually just about
to start editing.
This is one which, depending on my schedule, I’m not positive whether or not this video
will air first and then you’ll see this next video tomorrow or if you take a look
at this video, it might be already published.
Regardless, it will be up within a day or so of this particular screencast going up.
This is the video that I recorded just a little while ago today.
We can see the different tracks that I was talking about.
This is Screenflow.
Now in Screenflow what I’ve got is I’ve got a playback window here at the top.
I’ve got a Tools and Bin area.
This is from my resources but this is also where I actually do the most of my editing
work as far as applying different effects, filters or any moves and creative touches
to the video.
Then at the bottom, I have the multi-track playback area.
This is so important because this is a visual representation of what’s happening in time.
The tracks are at the top one is my video track and the bottom one is a recording of
the screen track, of the screen itself.
Now we can add more tracks.
I’m going to add some more.
In a few moments here, I’m going to add a little bit of extra, a graphic opening,
musical introduction and that sort of stuff.
I’ll be adding that here so we can actually move these tracks up and down depending on
what we need.
We can also split them and edit them in a variety of different ways, adding transitions,
bringing additional clips in, that sort of stuff.
Now the hierarchy here is anything close to the top of this playback screen is the most
in the foreground so my video track here, if I were to take that video track and slip
it behind the screen track, you’ll see that it disappears.
Here it is in front.
Now I use a technique called green screening to key out the background which I’ll show
you in just a few moments but if we scrub it forward and background, we can now see
the video playing.
Now every element within a screencast, you can edit independently.
You do that by selecting whichever track you’re working on and then selecting editing tools.
In the case of Screenflow those editing tools, as I said, are here in the corner.
The first thing that I might want to do, the first thing that I always do with all of my
videos after I’ve recorded it is I bring in my introduction, I bring in my opening.
So I’m going to do that.
Actually, the first thing I do is put the green screen on.
I guess I should add the green screen for you right now and show you that.
Instead, I will take my video portion here.
Actually, I’m going to do a little trick here.
Because I actually recorded the screen at 1200, I want the resolution to be 1900 x 1080.
That’s just for playback in YouTube.
I just have to apply that and I’m just adjusting the screen size here.
There we go.
All right, so now I need to go.
That’s a little more advanced than you probably need to worry about but since I’m actually
editing this right now, I have to do it right.
Once again, I select my video track here which has the audio embedded.
I can see the waveform of the audio so I can see where I actually go quiet here at this
point here on the audio.
We’ll deal with that in a moment but the first thing I want to do is I want to adjust
the size of that video.
I want that video to be probably 60%.
It’s kind of the size that I typically use here.
See how the video has a little shadow behind it?
That’s going to be a problem when I create the green screen so I’m going to turn off
the shadow over here in the Tools.
I’m going to position the video to where it’s actually going to play back.
You can see with the screen here that I actually have a little bit of a shoot-off here where
my camera has a wider angle than my green screen does behind me.
So I’m going to go into my cropping tools right here and I’m going to crop the right-hand
side so that you can’t see that shoot-off.
Then I’m going to add the filter that will key out this background.
Now my lighting is pretty good.
It’s not perfectly set up right now.
I’m still adjusting my studio a little bit.
I prefer to have a little more even light on that particular green screen behind me
but no matter, it’s going to work because what I do is I choose Video Filter here and
I add a video filter.
These are the different sorts of filters that I can use.
Some can really be artistic.
I just look for something that’s really practical.
I’m going to add the filter and that keys out most of the background.
But you can see down here, it still didn’t do quite a perfect job.
There are a couple of different ways that I can adjust that.
I could actually adjust the balances here, the white clip, the tolerance or the angle
that will change it but the easiest way to actually get rid of the rest of the shadow
is to just select the slightly darker color than it pre-selected.
If I turn off the chrome key, it will choose the average green color that it sees in the
background but instead I’m going to tell it to choose a darker color.
Do you see where I put that little indicator?
By choosing that slightly darkest color, it keys out more of the background and experience
just tells me that that’s going to work just fine.
So now I’ve got this nice background keyed out.
Now you can see me.
Isn’t that awesome?
Typically speaking now, the next thing I would do is I would start to add my different assets.
Now I’d probably go through and be doing some editing but you don’t want to watch
me doing it, taking out little mistakes and stuff like that which I actually don’t do
very much of.
But if I take a look here at my Tools area, I can adjust the sound here.
I can also add a whole variety of different types of special effects here.
In a few moments, I will show you one of the most important effects which is actually zooming
in and out of different screens.
But before I do that, I need to add the little opening theme that you saw playing just a
few moments ago.
What I’m going to do is I’m going to add that as media.
I’ve prerecorded that and I’ve got it sitting here on my drive.
I actually have a little package of the different types of graphics that use in each of my videos
so I just import them all at once.
It just saves me time.
I don’t necessarily use all of them in every video but it saves me time by importing them.
This, I definitely use.
This is my opening.
This is the opening which we I’ll see right here.
Do you see how we have that little opening?
Where that starts is I can see visually right here that I do my opening, “…today on
DottoTech.”
There it is right there.
So I typically will just push that a little bit ahead so that the music starts.
Then how I do it is—I don’t know; I’m not the world’s greatest editor but I’ve
kind of figured things out myself—I go into the video controls and I start this out at
zero.
I start it out so you can’t see it.
When the music starts, it starts there and then I’m kind of giving a thumbs up.
When that happens there, I choose an action.
By creating an action that applies some sort of activity to the video track that we have
selected since I have the opening video selected even though we can’t see—that’s because
it’s scaled down to zero—I’m going to add an action and I’m going to actually
zoom it up to 150% which again the way the way that I’ve designed my video layout means
that it’s going to go full screen.
Do you see here this little yellow bar?
This tells me that there’s an action there and if we watch what happens in the actual
flow of the video, there it goes.
It just zoomed right up.
Now again I look here and I can see the music is still fairly loud here.
I’m still doing my intro but I’ve started talking a little bit early.
I’ve timed it out.
Now what I can do is actually I can select these two clips down here, move my scrub bar
to ahead here and by right-clicking my mouse, I can split these clips.
That allows me to take all of this video now and move this down to where the music starts
to die out because that’s really where I come back in.
Do you see how that happened?
So I’m now starting to talk here.
What I’m going to do is at that point here, I’m going to take the video again, I’m
going to add another action and I’m going to scale it down to zero.
Now the little transition that we have goes like this.
I’m not sure if you can hear it or not.
I’m going to turn the audio up a little bit loud so you can hear the background.
So there it is.
You see the opening for the video, just how it works.
Now the next thing I’m just going to show you quickly before I finish everything up
is how we would zoom in on a different screen because one of the keys to screencasting is
being able to move in and out.
You’ve seen how I’ve added an extra element.
Now what I’m going to do is I’m going to choose the screen recording track which
is the very back track here and I’m going to add an action.
Let’s say I actually would just want to zoom in on this title and this graphic here.
I’m going to add an action and then I can use these tools here.
Now I would actually end up using keyboard and mouse shortcuts which allow me to do it
interactively.
I’m just going to pull that up like that.
Now we see another one of these actions appearing in this track here and we see the move that
happens.
So we have that ability as well.
Now in screencasting, we go way beyond this ability to move in and out.
We could also create radar pulses that come out of our mouse click.
We can create areas that are shadowed or blurred.
You often see me blurring out personal information or account information and we do all of that
within these tracks, within these tools up here.
But what I wanted to show you today was the basic process of creating these different
elements for a screencast.
If you take a look at what we’ve done, we’ve got our video track that we’ve recorded.
Now we did something fairly sophisticated in keying it out but we have that.
Part and parcel with our video track is our audio track and you saw how nice it is because
it’s all synced together.
Behind that we have the screen recording itself.
Now we could create a screencast without having any video track in front at all.
We could just have our voiceover and have the screens behind, recording them.
Then we have the ability to add other elements such as in this case here, an entire video
track, or if I also wanted to I could just bring in say a graphic element like this that
I can position into the video.
I can say please post below and join our conversations.
I can just position that like that and then I’ve got that enabled as well.
With this I could add transitions to the front and the back.
We can add starting and ending transitions and then I’ll show you what they look like.
These are just kind of special effects that happen.
Do you see how we have all of these different ways to bring things in?
If I chose a cube introduction, take a look here.
Just watch right where that graphic is going to appear.
We see that it will zoom in.
Did you see how it zoomed in?
We’ve got those abilities to kind of build each and every different element and build
each and every different layer within the video.
When it’s all finished—before I wrap things up I should show you what we do when it’s
all finished—we choose everything we’ve got and then we export it.
We can export it as a different web style.
I always export it in the highest quality that I can.
We can also customize where it’s going to go to.
I can actually send it directly.
If you look here, I can actually publish it to things like YouTube, Vimeo, Dropbox or
Facebook.
I can actually publish it directly out of this as well.
But I think I’ve given you a good idea of an overview of what screencasting is.
All of the applications do the same basic things as I’m showing here.
They’re going to record the screen.
They’re going to give you an option to record video and audio.
They’re going to allow you to time them together through some sort of a timeline interface,
to be able to chop the video up and add transitions in between and tell a story with your video
and then they’re going to allow you to either export it into either just a video format
or actually export it to some online service.
That’s the basis of what screencasting can do.
What you do with it is entirely up to you but I’m pretty sure you can come up with
some magic for screencasting.
As you can tell, it’s something that I’m passionate about, I love and I enjoy working
with it each day.
It’s an awesome way to tell stories.
I much prefer it to writing blogs.
I much prefer doing videos to writing blogs as you probably know if you’ve been following
me.
That’s it for today.
Did you learn something?
If you want to know more about screencasting, please continue to encourage me in the Comments
below.
I look for that.
Now there are three ways to stay in touch with us here on DottoTech.
The first is please subscribe to this channel.
Secondly, you sign up for our newsletter.
Then you’ll hear about upcoming webinars and trainings that I have and yes indeed,
I have some coming up on not just screencasting but also using this technology for doing webinars
and for doing tutorials, courses and trainings.
I’m going to be talking a lot about screencasting in upcoming webinars so by all means sign
up for our newsletter for that.
Finally, DottoTech is a community-funded channel through Patreon.
If you don’t know what Patreon is, it’s very cool.
It allows content creators like me to be supported by the audience that watches and values the
content.
For as little as a dollar a month, you could help keep DottoTech on air and there are perks
which are all described at the Patreon site including at the $10/level free access to
our courses, which is just an awesome perk, I think.
Of course, I think.
I hope that you found today to be valuable.
I’ve really enjoyed sharing it with you and that’s it for me.
Till next time, I’m Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!