Quick tips for creating compelling screencasts on Screenr

So you have checked out Screenr, and are ready to make some kick ass screencasts. Here are some tips to make your screencasts ultra compelling and easy to view on an iPhone.

Use a cool desktop background, and minimize your browser before you begin recording. The screencast thumbnails that you see on Screenr are always much more compelling when the first frame of the movie is not a screenshot of the recording page. Notice how on the Screenr home page all the Popular Screencasts have an awesome thumbnail? That isn’t a coincidence. Better thumbnails make it more compelling to watch the screencast.

Record narration. Screencasts without any audio are boring. I know everyone hates the sound of their own voice, but really, you don’t sound as bad as you think.

Keep your recording area clean. Remove excess junk in your recording area. See the two screenshots below. Which would be easier to follow a demo on?

Cluttered

Clean

Embed in a blog don’t link to it. Back when I worked at Macromedia we created demos of a lot of KB articles, and in the articles we linked to the demos. The problem was, nobody clicked on them. We eventually started embedding them in the post because people were more likely to view them if they didn’t have to go to another page.

Use a 16:9 recording aspect ratio. From the help page…The embedded player size uses the high-definition aspect ratio of 16:9. If you record with a 16:9 ratio, you won’t have black bars. So pick one of the preset HD sizes of 854×480 or 1280×720. You can also select one of these two presets and shift-drag the corner of the recording frame. This will lock the aspect ratio but allow you to select a resolution.

Use large mouse icons if users will be viewing on an iPhone. If you record on large resolution screens, it can be difficult to see the mouse movement when viewing on an iPhone. You can make the experience better for iPhone users if you use large mouse icons. Note: Use the Windows Standard (extra large) pointers, other pointer sets may not be captured. Turns out this only appears to work on Windows Vista/Windows 7. So this doesn’t work on XP. Sorry folks.