In today's episode I'm going to discuss the pros and cons of using a script when
recording a screencast.
Hey guys and thanks again for joining me - in today's episode I'm going to talk
about screencasting. So screencasting if you're not familiar with that, is a
technique for capturing your screen with a voiceover and then sharing that online
so I'm sure many of you have watched YouTube videos before where you've
wanted to learn how to do something on a particular piece of software and you've
jumped on YouTube and typed in the search query and you've watched a short
video of somebody talking you through you know a specific technique that's
essentially screencasting and that's actually what we do at Videobites so we
create professional quality screencast videos for different systems and
software. But in today's episode I wanted to talk about different ways of doing
this. The first way is to do it without a script and this is a bit more relaxed, a
bit more informal. The second way to do it is with a script and in this video I
want to share the pros and cons of doing it in each of these different ways. So
before we get started let me show you a couple of examples and to give you some
background - this is a project that I worked on earlier this year and what I
did is I created a short mock up video for my client just to show them what a
screencast video would look like for their software. So I did this first
example without a script and when I actually won the business I obviously
created more videos for which I use scripts and I'll talk about why I did
that in a moment - but let me show you the first example which is without a script:
"Ok so I want to send this email now quite often I want to send the emails to
people in different time zones so the send later feature is really useful for
me I don't want to send them emails in the middle of the night so I can use the
send later feature now what I would usually do now is just click on the send
button send the email but I want to send it later so I'm going to click on the
little alarm clock icon here and and if you hover over it you can see it says
send later". So as you probably noticed there was a few hesitations I sort of
stammered and stuttered a little bit and I didn't really know where I was going
with the video but I kind of had a rough idea so you can see it was quite
relaxed. In this next example it's exactly the same video but I use the
script: "So quite often I want to send the emails to people in different time zones
I don't want to email them in the middle of the night or at the weekend
so I can use the send later feature to schedule my emails
now what I would usually do is just click on the send button and the email
would be sent straight away." So now you've seen a couple of examples
unscripted and with the script, I'm going to talk about the advantages and the
disadvantages of each technique - let's start with unscripted. So the main
advantage of not writing a script for your screencast is that it takes a lot
less time to create the screencast now obviously that's very dependent on the
person who's creating the screencast and one of the disadvantages to using an
unscripted technique is that the person doing the video must be the subject
matter expert because obviously they know what they're talking about but the
main advantage here is that it's a much quicker process and technically you can
open up screencasting software like Camtasia and use that just to capture
the screen whilst your subject matter expert is
talking and make these little videos the disadvantage of that technique is you're
at the mercy of the person doing the presentation so first of all the person
talking must be the expert there's no way that somebody who didn't know the
software would be able to make that video that's fine if it's just one
person and they're the expert and they're going to make the videos and
that's done with but you have to think long term what happens if that person
leaves the company what happens if that person is not available to make the
videos in the future these are some of the considerations you might want to
think about when you're deciding whether huge scripts or not another advantage of
not writing a script is that the language is a lot more natural and it
feels like you know just like this video that I'm making now I'm not reading a
script I'm talking you know from my mind and I'm thinking about what I'm saying
as I mean as I'm going along so what are the positives of using script well I
mentioned a couple previously but the first positive is that it doesn't have
to be the subject matter expert who's doing the voice recording so a good
example of that is this video here and I'll put a link in the card at the top
of the video but this video was recorded by a voice-over artist who had no
experience of the software whatsoever he was just reading and recording his voice
off a script and that means that as long as that voice-over artist is available
in the future I can always use him to record the
voiceovers for my script the second advantage of using a script is that
there's no pauses or hesitations you're not going to have people sort of
stopping and I'm using bridging words to get them from one sentence to the next
because they're not quite sure what they need to say the sentences are going to
be constructed correctly you're gonna use the right terminology
and this can be really important if you're delivering videos to customers
whether you need the quality to be high the other advantage when you're using a
script is that the presenter won't go off on any tangents and quite often that
happens and I know from personal experience from doing this vlog quite
often as I'm talking I'll think of things that are relevant and I'll go off
on different tangents which you know in a vlog format I think is fine but if
you're watching a screencast where you need to be kind of focused and you just
want to learn some techniques you don't want to be going off on tangents so
having a very defined script where you know exactly what's coming next it's
probably a better way to do it another advantage of using a script is that the
language is much more consistent so you're not going to have variations in
the different words that are used the different phrases that are being used
obviously the disadvantage of using a script is that your video production
time is going to be longer so the technique that we would use is to write
the script first we would record the voiceover from the script and then
afterwards we would record the screencast and then we would synchronize
the voiceover with the screencast which does take a little bit longer when
you're talking about editing - we've got it down to a fine art now and we can do
that quite quickly but there's no hiding the fact that it does take longer so I
hope that was useful if you're interested in seeing the full process
that we use for creating videos Videobites I'll put a link to that in the
description below and you can go and check that out if you enjoyed the video
please click like and please subscribe and if you have any questions or
comments please drop them into the comments box below the video and I'll
see you in the next episode. Cheers!
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét