Hi. This is Paul Andersen. I get lots of questions about how I put together my educational screencasts.
And so what I thought I would do is just kind of show you making one and how I do it. And
then kind of use that as a model to show you how to do one of your own. And so the software
that I'm going to run is three-fold. First thing I'm in is something called Keynote.
This is similar to PowerPoint on a PC. And what it does is allows you to set up your
presentation. The next piece of software I'm using is something called OmniDazzle. And
what that does is allows me to write on the screen using a pen. And then the last thing
is ScreenFlow. And so if you're ever making one of these what you have to do is actually
capture what is going on on the screen. ScreenFlow does that. And it also is able to copy or
capture this video and the voice that's coming through right now. So those are the three
pieces of software. Presentation software, pen software and then finally screen capture
software. And so the first thing I do is I actually put together a screen presentation.
Just like I'm going to lecture in class, I put down my ideas and kind of organize those
in to a sequence of slides. On each of those slides I leave a space so I can actually insert
video there when I get to the editing part. And so let's take a stab at this. And so,
Hi. I'm Paul Andersen and welcome to educational screencast walkthrough. The hardware that
I'm loping at in front of me is sitting right here. I've really got four pieces of hardware.
First one is a computer. I'm running a MacBook. I've also got a microphone on the top that
allows me to pick-up a better kind of sounding voice then the one that's built into the computer.
I also have a webcam. The webcam sits right there. So it's picking up the video that you
see. And then finally the fourth thing that I have is a tablet. So let's talk a little
bit about each of those in more detail. The computer I'm using is a MacBook. It's a 2010
MacBook. Nice thing about it is it's running the most up-to-date system software, 10.6.
The nice thing about that is most of the new screen capture software requires pretty up-to-date
software. And so you have to run, at least on the Mac side a 10.5 in order to use most
of the screen capture video. PC you want to run, you know you essentially want to have
a webcam if you can built in. And then you want to have the up-to-date software. And
I'm sure that you could run this on Linux as well. I'm just not familiar with that.
So again, if you've got a new computer that's going to work great for this. Next thing you
need is a webcam. I don't spend a lot of money on that. It's just built into the computer
itself. It sits right here. Lots of times the video I'll actually make them smaller
within the screencast. And so I don't feel like I need a really high quality video camera.
I'm sure you could use an external video camera if you wanted to as well. But I'm happy with
the one that's built in. It's also nice as I move the computer around during the day.
I don't have to worry about hooking up a camera. Next thing that I purchased was a microphone.
If you've seen some of my other screencasts you'll notice that I used to wear these really
big dorky headphones. And the reason why wasn't so I could hear, but so it would position
the microphone very close to my mouth. And so I kind of did away with that when I bought
this. This is a Samson Go Mike. The nice thing about it is it clips right here on the top
of my computer. And so it picks up my voice as I talk towards the video camera. And I
think it does a nice job of picking it up. I think it's one of those things when you
are watching a video, you can't tell, but you may like one video over another. And one
of the big things is that it just has higher quality sound. And so I think it's worth spending
a little money to get a nice microphone. But I had to get one that didn't really get in
my way. The last thing that I added this year is a tablet. This is a graphics tablet. Nice
thing about it is that you can actually write with a certain amount of precision on the
screen. And if I were to try to use just my mouse or my track pad I wouldn't be able to
get that kind of clarity. The other nice thing about it is it has these buttons. And so I
can assign different functions for each of these buttons. So these ones on the top I
use to actually advance or go backwards in the slide show. I use this one to bring up
that writing software. And then I use this one to actually erase. And so if I hit that
button right there it erases everything that I actually just wrote. Okay. Now let's get
to the software. Software side, what you need to start out with is presentation software.
And so the software I'm using again is Keynote. It's nice for the Mac. It really works well
with iPhoto and bringing in things and resizing. But I could just as well be using PowerPoint
if I'm on a PC or even on a Mac for that matter. And so that's the first thing you need. And
think out how you want to talk. What sequence of steps do you want to go through. And then
lay it out in Keynote. Next thing I use is screen capture. The screen capture software
I use is something called ScreenFlow. And so that's actually recording everything that
I do right now. And you will be able to see it in just a minute or so. And so again it
captures what's on the screen and then the video coming from the webcam as well. And
then the last thing I use is drawing software. So what I'm using is something called OmniDazzle.
I've looked at some other ones but this one seems to function the best. It just allows
me to scribble on the screen and then quickly erase it. Okay. I've done this for a little
while. And I've come up with my list things that I think would help you. First thing I
tried was adding, because I thought it was kind of boring, my presentation, so I had
music in the background. I found that that's a really really really bad idea. Music is
just going to be a distraction. And so maybe a little bit at the beginning but then it
should just be voice. Next one, voice input. After you're done making your video, I usually
make sure that that goes to mono. If you're moving from side to side when you're talking
it becomes really distracting. And so I can actually take all of that audio and then squeeze
it into one mono track. Because our voice is mono. It's not stereo. Next thing I found
is that you should include your face. A lot of kids in my class really respond well to
seeing my face. And they thought it was kind of creepy when they couldn't see it. And so
I think that's been something good. And if you think about it all the videos on YouTube
that are popular are just somebody sitting in front of a webcam talking. Next one, zoom
in. In other words it's really to hard to see the screen. Especially when you have text
on the screen at all. And so I try to zoom in as much as I can to give the viewer kind
of a good shot at what you're trying to talk about. The next one I try to keep my videos
to ten minutes or less. This was, it was created by YouTube, this ten minute limit. And it
ended up being a nice thing for me. If my videos go much longer than that I think it's
just too long and people tend to get bored. Even when I watch videos, man if I see something
that's eight or nine minutes I'm willing to watch it. But if it gets much longer than
that I'm just not going to cash in. Okay. And then the last is that I just think YouTube
is really cool. So I put all of my videos on YouTube. You're going to have the biggest
viewership. They do a nice job of letting you kind of customize how your videos are
going to be displayed on your site. And it's just the biggest fish in the pond. And so
I love YouTube. Okay. So after I'm done with a video like that, now what'll I'll do is
ScreenFlow. I'm going to get out of this. And so I'm going to stop recording. And when
I do that my face is going to disappear and I'm going to have to show you what it looks
like on the inside. Okay. Now that I've quit screen flow, it shows me this video editor.
And so I can go back and look at myself in the video I just shot. So I can see some of
that. So now I can just edit. And so if I want to, for example, take this video and
put it right here in the middle of the screen and maybe resize it down a little bit, it's
easy to just move that. Or if I want to go out here, let's say farther, right here at
this point in the video, I'm actually going to show you the things down on the bottom
of my screen. So what I could do, play that, so now I could zoom in to this at the bottom.
So I'm going to click here add a video action and now I'm just going to simply zoom in to
the bottom. And so you can see the things on the bottom. And then maybe I want to move
my head up a little bit so I'm going to add a video action to that. Move my head up here.
And then I could play that. "The first thing I'm in is something called Keynote. This is
similar to PowerPoint . . . " I could also do things that I talked about before. Like
I go to my audio and I could mix it to mono. I can also do things like increase the size
of the cursor. So I can make that, down here, make that mouse pointer bigger when it's on
the screen. And I can do other things like add text. I can add images. I can video like
that. And so if we go back and look at what it looks like now at this point. "And so the
software that I'm going to run is three-fold. The first thing I'm in is something called
Keynote." Okay. Now once I have the video the way that I want it, the neat thing about
ScreenFlow is I can simply publish it to YouTube. I put in my information and my password, sign
in and it's going to take care of compressing the video, uploading it to YouTube. And then
I'm pretty much done. And so that's Screen Flow. And that's my walk-through of screen
casting. And I hope that's helpful.