What's Fresh

Screencasting, a Learning Experience

We build many sites using our CMS of choice, ExpressionEngine. When it comes to training our clients on how to use it, we always do an in person or over the phone training session. There can be a lot of information for someone to retain, so in order to help with this, we thought it would be great to have some sort of leave behind that our clients can reference later on down the line in case they need it.

We thought about creating a PDF manual, but in the end settled on screencasts. We felt that the videos would illustrate the processes a little better and be more memorable than reading a document. Plus, we could post them to YouTube and Vimeo for others to see and hopefully get some use out of.

This was our first attempt at creating screencasts, and it proved to be a good learning experience. It really helped us fine tune our training skills and also left us with some great material for our clients.

First, we had to research which tools we would need to create the screencasts. We knew we’d need some sort of screen recording software and a decent mic. We researched a few of the popular screen recording apps out there and ended up choosing Screenflow. It seemed to be easy to use, had a full feature set and a nice interface and got great reviews.

Next we had to choose a mic to get better quality audio than a built in computer mic would provide. We ended up going with the MXL USB.006. MXL makes great mics at affordable prices and we’ve had good experiences with their products in the past so it was an easy choice.

So now that we had the tools, we had to figure out how to use them. Learning how to use Screenflow was a snap and setting up the mic was super easy, so we were up and running very quickly. In our first few attempts, we tried recording the audio & video at the same time using Screenflow and did not use a script. Improvising proved to be an exercise in futility, and after several failures, we decided it was time to try it another way as frustration had set in. More skilled speakers or someone seasoned at training might have better luck doing it this way, but we kept getting tongue tied and kept having to start over. Otherwise, there would have been way too much tedious editing to do.

So we wrote a script and tried recording the audio by itself. Although this gave the voiceover a slightly less natural feel and ended up sounding like it was read from a script, we felt it was better in the long run and would get more natural with practice. We could also easily edit out any flubs and prep our audio before recording the video. And since we could focus on just the audio, there were far fewer mistakes. We used Adobe Soundbooth to make our edits and clean up the audio. After a little compression, noise reduction and volume correction, we were all set.

Next, it was on to Screenflow. We just played the audio and listened along as we recorded the action on screen. We usually got the video done in one take, so recording the video was pretty quick. This process was definitely proving to be the way to go!

Once the video was done in Screenflow, we imported the audio file we created earlier, matched up the timing of the audio to the video, added our intro and outro (which was all created in Screenflow) and we were done. And we loved the fact that Screenflow lets you upload your videos directly to YouTube and Vimeo. It creates the video and uploads them in one shot, so it’s very fast & convenient. You can even fill in the title, description and tags right in Screenflow.

We ended up creating 4 screencasts covering some of the basics of ExpressionEngine. The first video covers publishing content to your site. The second video goes over editing existing content, while the third video discusses the new and improved file manager. The last video touches on a few of the features in the user account area.

So check out our ExpressionEngine Screencast Series | The Basics, and we’d love to get your input on them. You can check them out on our YouTube channel as well.

We plan to do more screencasts and hopefully each one will get better and better as we get our process down.