In part one of this two part series we walked you through writing a script and recording the video for your screencast. In this final installment, we’ll talk about recording the audio, adding effects and doing the final mixdown.

But first, you face a fork in the road, a choice which will determine not only your fate, but that of all mankind: Do you do the narration in-house, or do you hire it out?

Having a pro do your voiceover:

Having a voice talent record your 1-2 minute narration should run you anywhere from $200 to $500. It’s an attractive deal. You don’t need to buy any gear. You don’t have to spend hours setting up, or do 100 takes yourself, or … you get the idea.

Martin Bromley, maker of EnergyLens - A building energy management application, has tried doing it himself and decided it’s not worth it.

More likely I’m going to try outsourcing the audio recording to someone else (using a script that I’ll write). I don’t think I have a voice made for recording, and it requires just too many takes and too much editing to use my voice to get a recording that I’m happy with!

Martin Bromley

If you’re interested in going this route, there are plenty of places where you can hire voice talent. Check out www.voicetalentnow.com and www.procommvoiceovers.com for starters.

Doing the voiceover in-house:

This is the method we chose, since we already had all of the necessary equipment, and we want to do a series of training screencasts in the future.

If you go this route, you’ll soon learn one important lesson. Everyone hates the way their voice sounds on tape. God knows I do.

But chances are it’s not *that* bad. You may never be Povaratti, but you don’t need to be. There’s nothing that says a narrator can’t sound like a normal human being.

Recording the audio:

This can be the most gear-intense aspect of the whole production. So I’ll forgive you if you want to go over to musician’s friend and geek out a little.

You have three options

• $30: The skype headset. Personally, I wouldn’t use this for a sales video, but for something that can be less polished, it’ll do.
• $120: Get a decent usb condenser microphone like the “snowball”. The audio will sound good and you won’t need to buy much else. If I was starting from scratch, this would be my choice.
• $300: The “semi-pro” setup includes a good home-studio condenser microphone, a mixing board with phantom power, and a USB audio input. I went this route, just because I happened to already have all of that equipment.

But - you may ask - does it really matter? Does the $300 setup really give you better sound than the $30? Well, don’t take my word. Listen to a demonstration. Headphones are suggested.

Make a working copy of your video

The first thing you need to do is to export your screencast to an AVI or WMF file that you can watch as you record the audio. We do this because camtasia’s preview mode doesn’t always play the video at the right speed.

Where to record?

Robert Smith from BlueBerry Software (makers of the Flashback screencasting software) gave use these tips:

A good room is the most important thing. Try and record first and test the playback. If it sound very hollow, then your room is not ‘dry’ enough and it will always sound home recorded. If you can, choose a room with lots of soft furnishings, close the curtains, shut all doors and see if you then get a nice dry sound, Also, buy as good a microphone as you can. A professional microphone like the Shure SM58 will probably require a booster or a mixer to work properly in a PC, so rather than go to that level of complexity, buy the best headset you can afford. $40 will probably get you a fairly decent one to be able to deliver reasonable quality speech.

Robert Smith

Now set up your recording equipment. You probably won’t have a recoding studio handy. But with a little ingenuity, you can get decent results on your own. Walk in closets are great, because they generally are small, windowless, and have good sound dampening properties.

Paul Young, from Skybound Software, suggests recording your audio inside a car!

Here’s a gem: Setup a laptop and do your recordings in a car! Really.
Because of the mandatory sound deafening material that is built into all
cars, anything recorded inside them tends to sound like it was done in a
high-end recording studio.


Paul Young

Make sure you use a pop filter

You will need a pop filter. A pop filter is a little barrier of shear fabric that you place in front of the microphone to prevent “P” sounds from sounding like and explosion. If you don’t have one, you can make one by bending a wire coathanger into a circile, and stretching pantyhose over it. It’s not pretty, but it works.

If I record it myself I’m definitely going to get a better
microphone and pop-filter.

Martin Bromley

Do a sound check

If using mixers, or any other audio equipment that needs power, make sure you plug everything in to the same outlet. Otherwise you could wind up with a background hum caused by the voltage drop.

Start Recording!

Q: Are there any tips you have to make the narration go smoothly?
A: The 6 p’s Perfect Practice Prevents Piss Poor Performance

Robert Smith

Do a few takes, watching the video while you speak.

Stand up while you’re speaking. It’s a simple but effective way to improve your breathing, and help you project your voice.

It’s best to record everything in one shot. But if you find that to be too hard, focus on the phrases in your narration. Try to get each phrase right at least once. Then you can stitch them together during the editing process.

For multiple takes, make sure that you keep your mouth in the same position relative to the microphone, otherwise you’ll wind up with obvious differences, which will make it hard to splice.

Clean up the audio

When you’re happy with your recording, it’s time to get rid of any background noise that may have filtered through. I’ve made a little example, so you can see the results. Listen to it with headphones. You may be surprised.

Finally, save the file in a lossless format, like WAV. If you recorded at 24 or 32 bits, be sure to downsample the file to 16 bits, otherwise your screencast software may not import it.

Also, be sure to uncheck dithering. Dithering introduces noise to make the conversion better from 32 to 16 bits. Maybe this helps for music, but for voice recordings, it just makes them sound staticy.

Import the audio

Now we import the audio into Camtasia. I imported it into audio track 2 and deleted the original audio track one.

If you’re timing wasn’t exactly right, you can split the audio up into chunks, to reposition them.

Edit the video.

So now that we have both video and audio, it’s time to add effects.

Modern screencasting software gives us lots of ways to add punch to our screencasts, once they’ve been recorded.

Let’s step through:

Custom callouts:

Most screencasts have some kind of graphic overlay at the beginning or end. The simplest way to do this is to use your screencast software’s callout title, or caption feature. But for some reason they seem to not render the fonts as well as, say, PhotoShop.

So I created a beginning and ending graphic. Then imported them as custom callouts. Just give them a little transparency, and add to the beginning and end and we’re done.

Tip: If you’re using flash, you can make the callout clickable, to link to -say - your signup page.

The other problem I had was working out how to add a download link at the
end of the video. There didn’t seem to be any obvious way to do this in
Camtasia Studio. It turns out it’s dead easy. Thanks to advice from Simon
Shutter on the BoS forum, you first add the link text or graphic to your
video and then add a callout of type ‘transparent hotspot’, positioning it
over the area you want to be able to click. Then in the flash hotspot
properties of the callout you can choose to ‘Jump to a URL’.


Mark Gladding

Zooms:

If you followed the instructions in the previous article and recorded your screencast at 2x the final screen size, There will undoubtedly be places where the viewer needs an up-close view of your application.

You can use the zoom and pan feature of camtasia to show only the area of interest and block out the rest.

Highlight:

The highlight callout is great if you need to show the user what you’re talking about. Be careful about adding too many, however. It can get confusing.

Some presenters also forget about their screencast tool’s highlight effect and instead choose to whizz the mouse around in circles, this just looks odd.

Ian Osvald

Transitions:

If you have multiple video clips, it can be jarring to move suddenly between them. So your screencasting software should let you add transition effects. In fact, most of them give you way too many. A simple fade is all you need.

Here are a few tips:

Don’t be afraid to cut out footage that seems to be too slow. When you’re waiting for your application to respond, or when you’re typing.

If you need to insert some extra footage to give you time to finish your narration, you can have the video pause on a certain frame, while you catch up. If the screen was already static, your viewers won’t even notice a difference.

Do the final encoding

Now that you’ve assembled your video, you need to do the final export. The easiest way for most people to view your site will be with a flash video. Whatever software you choose should be able to create all of the files you need for the flash video.

Use FLV format:

I learned this one the hard way. The exact same screencast rendered to FLV format was half the size of the SWF version.

In order to maintain the quality of your voice track, make sure that the sample rate is the same as it was in the original file.

The difference in quality between 44kHz and 16kHz audio is huge. Listen to these samples and see for yourself.

I kept the video quality at its maximum setting, since I didn’t want my text being garbled.

Add the video to your website and set up tracking, and you’re done.