You Ask, I Answer: Making Instructional Screencasts?

In today's episode, Thomas asks, What tool do you like to use to record your computer screen? Looking to make an instructional video, and I want to show the steps on the screen as I go. The tool that I prefer, I recommend strongly TechSmith's Camtasian. It's available for Windows and Mac computers. I use it the Mac version.

And what I like about it is that it has a lot of instructional elements that it's well designed for teaching with it. There are a lot of tools that can just record your screen, right? You can do that with video conferencing software, but you don't get any of the interactivity. So let me show you a very quick example here. Let's go ahead and move this up.

Within Camtasia, what you can do is I did a brief recording here, do things like cursor highlights or spotlights to show only a specific part of the screen. You can see there's a version of it there where I'm highlighting uh essentially w just where my cursor is, which is awfully handy if you want to be able to teach people what it is you're doing. There are other effects that I think are super helpful, uh, one of which is the ability to show keystrokes so as you're typing, uh you can s you can't really see it here. You can see at the bottom there's a little keystroke. There we go.

That's better. And it will show you this is what I'm typing on the keyboard as I'm doing work. These little things, and there's a lot of them. There's you know, masks, there's uh green screen effects, interactive hotspots. These are the kinds of the tricks to doing this is if you look at the way the system is structured and you look at uh all the features that are available in it, uh, you'll want to spend some time you know, getting the hang of what all the different buttons do, and then treat them like actors on a stage um or actors in a movie script.

Think about what you want each one to do. It plot out your lecture, your instructional video as though it were a movie. And so instead of having, you know, just straight cuts or directions for actors, which of these effects, where they make sense, uh, do you wanna use? Because there's a there's a lot in here, and there's some that are you know kind of fun, but like this reflection one. It's not super useful for instruction.

The ones for instruction that you're gonna use a ton are gonna be things like these cursor effects to be able to highlight where something is happening on screen and be able to uh animate and and and fit things on screen. Picture in picture is gonna be one of your best friends. So in this example here, I can take this video, I'm gonna scale it down to 25%. And so in the final video for today's episode, which is where this is gonna go, I'll be able to bring this up and be able to to have the picture in picture. So I would have it right here.

Um again, that's just a way for you to be able to have your lecture uh show up on screen or reverse it. Put your your face and your um uh your talking head in that little corner and have the the s the big slides and things take up most of the room. Recording instructional videos is filmmaking. It's a very specific kind of filmmaking, right? You're not gonna win an Oscar for it.

But it requires the same amount of planning and thought that you would put into making a motion picture. It's not as easy as just you know turning on hitting record and uh and just hoping it it goes well and you wing it, which I have done, and it turns out badly every single time. So the software is important, having the different features, having the different buttons, the ability to have a library of uh you know music and intros and things, the ability to store all your favorites uh and be able to use them easily. These are great tools, and uh Camtasia is one of the best tools for this for instructional videos. But as with everything, the tool is less important than how you use it, right?

If you can't uh cook, there's no difference between a five dollar frying pan and a fifty dollar frying pan, you're still gonna make garbage. So take the time to learn this, take the time to learn some basic filmmaking to go with the software. If you don't, you're not gonna create very useful instructional videos. And the thing about instructional videos in particular is that they are very different from regular films. An instructional video has to have a very strong structure in it that helps people get information into their heads.

So if you just open up Camtasia and you start recording and start talking, and it just comes out as you know, word vomit. Um it's not gonna be very helpful to the end user. They're gonna be lost very easily. If you have a very clear structure to your instructional videos, you'll do much better. So one of the ones that I use is very simple is what, why, how?

What is the thing? It's a first quarter of video, why is the thing important? Second quarter, and then how the last 50% is using the software to demonstrate how to do the thing. And if you do it in that's just one example of a storytelling structure for instructional videos, if you do that, you will get much better results. The tool will help you with the how, but you'll be able to think about how you want the thing structured.

One of the things Camtasia does really well is it has drop-in templates. So you could actually create um placeholders in uh say a 10 minute timeline here and label them what why how so that you know you have to fill those things with that particular content in order to be able to create a really compelling and helpful uh instructional video. So that's my recommendation. The one exception I will make is if you are doing something as a live stream. If you're going to do something as a live stream, uh I would recommend OBS, the open broadcast studio.

It's open source software. It does not contain any of the instructional tools, but it is free software for streaming that does a really good job of capturing uh different scenes and stuff, and you can do some of the you can do like subtitles and lower thirds in it, and that's really about the extent of what you can do, um, at least with the product out of the box. But that is a great tool for streaming. One of the things I like about it is that it also records a local copy of what you're streaming on screen, which you can then take, uh render and put into Camtasia, and then you can add some features, some of the features like highlight and stuff don't work with with pre built videos. You have to record using the Camtasia software itself, but other things like subtitles and stuff work just fine.

That's how I would that's the exception to the rule. So use OBS for live streaming, use Camtasia for recording, and you'll be able to create great compelling useful videos. So good question. If you have follow-up questions, leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter.

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