Knowing how to screencast is a valuable skill, You may have already tried doing it and you found that it takes a ton of work.
Generally, there are two approaches when it comes to creating screencasts:
- Record your screen and then do a voice over
- Record both simultaneously, but doing one step at a time while taking pauses between each step.
Each process has it's own pros and cons
Record your screen and then do a voice over
Recording audio and the screen separately sounds really good in theory. You'll read a script and your life will be easy.
However, the problem with voiceovers is that it's so hard to match the pace of the screen recording. Sometimes you're coding too fast, other times you're going too slow.
So the only fix is to keep adjusting the video speed and try doing multiple takes when you're recording the audio.
This is a ton of work and it can be really frustrating. So I personally don't use this approach.
Record both simultaneously, but doing one step at a time while taking pauses between each step.
This is a nicer approach because after recording you don't need a lot of editing. You can remove the pauses by looking at the audio track.
Also, if you know you messed up, you can just do a loud clap, so that you can find the bad takes a lot faster.
On the other hand, I find this approach very hard for me. I can't do two things at the same time (code + voiceover).
So for me to get a good take, I need to redo the same step multiple times.
So from my point of view, both approaches are hard.
One is hard in the production phase, and the other in post-production.
But it doesn't have to be this way. Here's how I do it:
Code. Pause. Narrate
- I record my screen
- pause
- read the explanation from a script.
When editing, all I need to do is grab the voiceover and decide where I want it to start
I don't mess up or forget what I want to say, and I'm not doing two things at once
This is a combination of the 2 approaches and works perfectly for me.
Here's a video where I show how I do it:
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