Essential recording strategies for screencasting

- You've learned a lot about the theory of recording a screencast. What I'm going to show you right now is myself actually recording one. We're going to do something really basic in Adobe Photoshop, which is a popular tool that has many online tutorials. This isn't so much about the Photoshop techniques, rather I'm going to record this and let you see me working. I'll also along the way pause and call a few things out that I'm doing, so you pay attention to the technique. But watch how a person who does this a lot would record a screencast. All right, we've already checked everything over, we know the mic is good, I've got my content loaded, my software works, everything is configured. Let me just launch the application and get the screencasting going. Make sure that you have opened up everything you are intending to use and then launch your screen casting app. I'll use ScreenFlow for right now. Checking my recording settings over, I see that I'm working with things here. I've got my screen record, I've got my webcam in use. We'll resize that video a little bit later. I could check the format but I'm going to set that to 1080P for the webcam video. The microphone is coming in our levels look good. And there's no need to record computer audio because we're using Photoshop and most pictures don't have sound when you capture them as a still image. All right, that looks good. What we'll do now is click record and let it count in. Before I start, I will go ahead and refresh my lips and my throat. (swishing sound) Now, that swishing sound may have sounded weird on camera, it did two things, I coated the inside of my mouth with liquid which makes the words sound less scratchy. Also, and we haven't taken a lunch break yet, it quickly cleaned my teeth. I know it's weird, but you don't want to do a screencast with a piece of food in your mouth. All right, looks good, I see my picture, I double check my clothes. It looks like everything's laying where it needs to, I've got my backdrop and I'm happy with stuff here. All right, now we'll go ahead and record. I'm going to move my chair a little bit closer to the desk, I want to make sure that I'm nice, good body posture but that the mic is reasonably close. I sit up, I look towards the camera and we're ready to go, let's click record. And it counts me in. Hi, my name's Rich Harrington, and I'd like to take a quick look at something we could do in Photoshop to ensure we have good image contrast. Let's work with a RAW file in Photoshop. I've already opened up that raw file and you'll see the Adobe Camera interface. Let's make a few changes here. Looking at the image there's nothing wrong with taking advantage of the auto button. This will evaluate the exposure and attempt to give us good content. Now, one thing you might have noticed here, I'm going ahead and talking back to you the folks watching this tutorial, is I maintain good eye contact and I kept my energy level up. Also avoid nervous behavior like shaking the mouse a lot and jiggling the cursor, it's very distracting. So if necessary, you can lift your hand off of the mouse and just let it hover. This'll cut down on mouse jiggle, which is really annoying to watch. All right, let's go back into the tutorial. Let's go ahead and check a few things here, I see that my clipping indicators are turned on. This is great because it makes sure that I don't crush the whites or the blocks. What I'd like to do is increase clarity and texture, this really brings out the dynamic range. But if I go too far, you'll see that there's some noise introduced as well as these cold blue pixels. Let's zoom in here so you could see that. I've called out key things as I've done it, I've identified things about the teaching process and I don't rush it. I let people see what we're doing and I don't keep zooming in and out or moving around. These blue areas indicate areas of crushed black detail. So as such, let's increase the black point slider and lift the shadows up a little bit more. It's okay to have a few areas that are pure black or crushed, but we want to be careful. These red pixels here indicate areas where the whites are too bright. So backing those off with the white slider or the highlights recovery is also important. Now, if you need to pause during the tutorial to take a sip of water or do anything else, that's fine. Just try to minimize standing up or down. If you leave the position and change your relationship to the mic it might sound different when you come back. Okay, we have what we need here and I'm satisfied with the image, let's zoom back out. Now let's make another adjustment here from the color grading section. What I'd like to do is introduce some oranges into the highlights. I'll slowly drag, then adjust the intensity. When you are recording a screencast it's going to feel slow and unnatural. Don't rush through the steps, you're not having to fly through these or jam them all together. If you do, what's going to happen is the person will feel rushed or pressured. In editing it's very easy to condense things, taking out pauses, gaps, breaths, sips of water or small mistakes. Now, let's go over to the high buckles. Notice I just made a mistake. That one I did on purpose, but you get the idea. You don't have to stop the tutorial and start all over again. It's so easy to fix this with editing, just take a breath and go back a sentence. Now go over to the highlights area. Notice I didn't repeat the action, it's going to be easy to screw things up if you try to rewind your steps. If you only made an audio mistake don't redo the video, just re-say the audio. During editing it's easy to take the correct video and the correct audio and put the two pieces together, now resume your tutorial. With our highlights controls, I'll put a little bit of cool area into the shadows. But I need to be careful there that we don't go too far and crush the highlights. That's looking great, let's go ahead and click the before button to see our current state versus where we started, and I liked the overall change. As you see there, a good straightforward tutorial with some performance tips as well. These are the things you don't normally get to see in our tutorials, because we cut some of these things out. But I wanted you to see what actually happens when we're on set. All right, this is a wrap-up there, so let's finish this off. I'm going to make something here for the editor. Now, sometimes you want to leave comments for yourself or the editor. We'll talk more about this a little bit later but here's a couple of strategies. When I make a mistake, I'll do this. (clicking sound) Or snap my fingers. This is great because it allows there to be an audio spike in the track, so we can see where there's a pickup or a visible change. (snapping sound) (clicking sound) Either of those creates a nice visible spike and shows up in the wave forms. Also, if I need to leave a note for the editor I might say this, remember in this section make this change, I'd like you to punch in on the tools for the color grading and make sure to pause long enough that we could really see the color change. Okay. (snapping sound) Now that we've got things done, we can click to open the image and you see the photo comes into Photoshop. Pause and hold for a few seconds, don't immediately stop or break character. Hold it because you need time to fade out on the transition. Now I'll stop the screen record and the file is captured immediately. And I mean, immediately before you start editing save your work, you don't want to lose things. So I'll say file save. And I will capture this into my screencasting folder and give it a name. We'll talk more about editing strategies a little bit later but notice what we did there, was we got exactly what we needed and hopefully it wasn't too weird. You got a little peek behind the curtain to see how things are done.