OK, part five of this series on creating content and this is a tutorial on creating video content in the form of screencasts. Unless you’ve been living on Mars for the past 2 years, you can’t help but have noticed that video has become massively popular on the Internet.

Until fairly recently, using video online required specialist and expensive tools and hosting, but with the techniques I’ll show you today, you can create and host your videos free of charge, and use them as a marketing tool to drive more traffic to your site!

Here’s the video, and below you’ll find the rest of this blog post if you’d rather read along than watch. (Plus you’ll also find all the links mentioned in the video below!)

Links

Download Camstudio: Camstudio (Windows only)

Download Copernicus: Copernicus (Mac)

Camstudio Tutorial – Recording and publishing video content

You already know how powerful video is. The problem is that many people are put off, with the misconception that producing video is difficult or requires skills they don’t have. Not true!

Download the Camstudio software above, and by the end of this tutorial you’ll be able to create awesome video tutorials, reviews and vlog (video blog) posts.

When you install and open Camstudio, the first thing you’ll notice is that the application is very small and quite simple. In fact, it’s so simple that if you click on the File menu you’ll notice that there isn’t even an Open or Save function! Don’t worry though, it’s not a limited demo version, when you record a new video you’ll be prompted to save automatically.

Setting up the software

Although it’s very simple software, we still need to set a few things up before we start. First go to the Region menu and you’ll notice that you can record full screen, or a region of the screen. If you’re producing video for the web (Youtube, blogs etc.) then I would suggest you don’t use full screen. The reason is that once your video is reduced down to the size you’ll publish at, it will look too small and squashed. I would suggest recoding a region of 640 by 480 pixels which is large enough for most applications, and is exactly twice the height and width of a YouTube video so your final video won’t look squashed.

The next thing to set is your audio input. Just like with Audacity yesterday, you need to select which input your microphone is plugged into and you do that from Options > Audio Options > Audio Options For Microphone. And finally it’s a good idea to set some keyboard shortcuts for Record and Stop in Options > Keyboard Shortcuts.

OK so we’re finally ready to click the record button. When you do (or hit your keyboard shortcut) you’ll see a bounding box at the size you specified earlier. Drag it to the correct position on the screen and click to start recording. When you’re done, click Stop or press the key you set as your shortcut and you’ll be prompted to save.

Branding your videos

Since Camstudio is so simple and doesn’t have any editing capabilities, here’s what I suggest you do in order to get the most from it. First of all, plan your recording before you start. Since you’re recording an area of the screen, rather than a single application, you can start your video with a splash screen. Using GIMP or OpenOffice create a screen with some title text, and your branding (i.e. the name of your site, business or product and the URL of your site). Now position that on screen so that it will show at the beginning of your video.

Branding showing below the application you’re demonstrating

If you create your splash carefully, and you have enough screen real estate in the video, you can have your branding showing all the way through your video.

Publishing and Promoting

Now here’s the key to getting the most benefit from your videos, while getting free hosting thrown in! Head over to YouTube and sign up for a free account. You can then upload your video and go to the video page. On the right side of the screen you’ll see an EMBED box with some HTML text beneath it. Copy and paste that into your blog, or web page, and you get your video on your own site while Youtube handles the hosting for you!