Capturing a screen's activity has become : Record, act, stop, save, upload, share. However, as you probably noticed, screencasts are not always very pleasant to watch, despite their great zoom-ins and haloed mouse cursors: Page loads, dialog boxes, mistakes, shaky mouse cursors, confusing voice over... Despite the simplicity of the core process, if you are planning to distribute your video to a wide audience (like the Web), it requires a quality video editing work. The gap between capturing a screen and producing a screencast is wide, and a wide array of competences is required to reach the status of professional. Let's go over a few of them:
Scenarist
Before you start anything, you need to make sure you got a story that leads somewhere. For example, if you are Twitter, you don't want to just show how to send a message, but you also want to induce the benefits of such an action, ie replies/discussions. It's called a benefit, and it has too be obvious, otherwise your video won't appeal that much to the viewers' motivations. Having a solid scenario will also help you avoid making a lot of mistakes during the screen capture.
Video capture vs Photoshop
The easy way to operate is to video capture a screen with tool such as Camtasia. It should be used if a project has a limited budget, and all the features advertised by the video can be accessible instantly. For example, if Youtube wants to show the benefits of uploading a video to Youtube, from its Website, it can show the uploading dashboard, and 5 minutes later, it can show the video on the channel page. If Adsense wanted to show the benefit of creating ad groups to grow conversions over time, showing the benefits of such an action will take time to capture.
The other option is to break down your Website pages into Photoshop layers, and play around with individual page elements on your video editing dashboard. Of course, this requires more prep work, hence a bigger budget. However, once everything's broken down into pieces, your possibilities broaden: The picture quality is enhanced, unwanted elements (like ads) can be easily removed, new elements that don't appear instantly on the Website can be added in the video, there is no more capture mistakes, a new Website design can be easily integrated to an ongoing video edition...
Worth mentioning, in the method chosen, you won't have the same frame rates and codec constraints.
Video Marketing
If the screencast is meant to promote your Website on sites such as Youtube, there are three major steps you need to take:
1. The scenario and video editing style need to be fun, sharable, and withholding your company's message.
2. You need to know the online/mobile video standards.
3. You need to know some SEO tricks specific to video.
Website/App Development
That is probably the most interesting part of screencasting. Imagine you are a tech entrepreneur, you have a project, and you need to talk to VCs for money, or you need to update them on the progress of your work. What is better and more reassuring? 1. A Powerpoint with text and illustrations explaining the state of your project, or 2. a video that shows your Website/App in action as if someone was using it?
Not only that, but seeing your product in action can lead to some advanced forward-thinking about the features and the design of a Website/application. In a way, you see the mistakes before they actually happen.
Last but not least, it is a great way to communicate with a development team that might not speak your language because located offshore. Those who go through this experience know how hard it is to get all the details of your product ironed out by offshore partners. Most of the time, they develop your product without understanding what it does, its benefit. It is no wonder that when they deliver something that sucks, it's hard to make them understand why it doesn't work. With a video, you can barely go wrong: The visual shows what is supposed to happen, and if the development team doesn't reproduce the features as they are enacted in the video, they can't tell you that you failed in communicating the specs.
