Learn. Show. Repeat.

Tag: video

Learning About Screencasting

A few months ago David Anderson started a new type of E-Learning Hero Challenge – creating screencasts (which are short ‘how-to’ video clips). I mentioned in an earlier blog post that one of the areas I wanted to build knowledge and skills in was screencasting so these new challenges would be a great opportunity to get started.

Another reason why these challenges appealed to me is that most of my role at B Online Learning is about teaching others – how to use Storyline 2 and the process of creating an eLearning module – so the challenges also seemed like a good fit in that regard just a different way of teaching and sharing what I know and a way to help develop my communication skills.

Creating these short how-to videos is something new for me so these early ones were a bit rough but I figure they’ll get better over time. Anyway, here’s a few of things I’ve learned so far when creating my screencasts:

Planning

I’ve found that the recording works better if you plan what you’re going to record and have a run through to make sure that things work the way you want them to and you know where you want to click. I don’t have a word for word script but I like to think through what I’m going to say as I do the practice. I tried off-the-cuff but it didn’t work for me.

Sound quality

I record my screencasts in my office at home and I shut the door and window to reduce any background noise. Initially I found the audio still wasn’t that great but I was using an old headset with a mic. I do have a USB microphone (Audio Technica) but when I tried it, it seemed to pick up ambient noise. So, I went to JB Hi-Fi and I found a Skype Headset (it has a USB connection and a noise cancelling microphone) and I’m much happier with the quality.

Recording Window Size

I use Articulate Replay to record my screencasts as it came with my SL2 licence and meant that I didn’t have to buy another program. It’s easy to use and I’m happy with the output. When you open up Replay you can set the size of the recording window to whatever size you need and initially I was recording at about 1000 x 700 but I found that when I looked at the recording on a larger monitor that it became a bit blurry and I think it was because the recording was being enlarged to fit on a bigger screen? Anyway, I asked my friend Veronica (another regular screencaster) what size she used and she said was using around 1430 x 860. Hers looked cleaner so I increased the recording size and it seems to have helped in the latest recording – ‘Using Master Slides’. So I’ll keep experimenting.

Click on the image below to see my most recent screencast and you can see all the recording that I’ve created in the Videos section of this site. Let me know what you think.

If you’re wondering about the circle animation that you see in my recordings, it’s a setting on your computer. Go to the Control Panel > Mouse > Pointer Options tab > select Show location of pointer when I press the CTRL key > Ok. That’s it!

To see all of the screencast challenge topics, click here.

If you’ve done any screen recording before please share any tips you have in the comments below.

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May 21, 2016
Making Videos Interactive

Often when we talk about our work, we talk in terms of ‘what’ we did. The Showing My Work series of posts aim to also capture the ‘how’ something was done.

E-Learning Heroes Challenge #94 – Interactive Video: Visual Interviews in Online Training. The brief: This week your challenge is to create an interactive video interview.

Every so often David Anderson posts a weekly challenge that I know I want to participate in (even if it’s not in the current week) and this was one of those challenges. I haven’t done a whole lot with shooting my own videos (apart from the Smartphone Video challenge) so I wanted to have a go and complete this one at some point. I noticed that for some reason, there weren’t as many entries for this challenge and I wondered if folks thought that it would take too long or that they didn’t have the right equipment. My demo was put together fairly quickly (using myself as the victim, I mean subject, also saved some time) and my equipment was not high tech. While the result was a simple looking entry it still does the job and here’s how I did it.

On a recent plane trip for work, I mapped out my ideas on paper (as I usually like to do):

I didn’t want to create anything too big or too complex, so my idea was to use four questions and I would be in the centre of the screen with the questions around me. When you click on a question, the video answer would play. I also had an idea to add an ‘introduction’ clip which give some instruction as to what to do – so I’d need five clips altogether.

Over the past few weeks, I seen David and other Community members who had used video make them look more interesting by placing a cover over the video so that it didn’t have the standard rectangular video on a slide look. I really liked the idea and I wanted to try to do something similar. Here’s the slide with the video sitting on it:

and the same slide after the cover is put on:

I used PowerPoint to create my cover and the first thing I did was to set up my PPT slide in the same aspect ratio as my Storyline project (4:3). Then I inserted a rectangle the same size as the slide and then inserted a circle shape (with no fill) and positioned it in the centre of the rectangle. Then by selecting both shapes, I was able to use PowerPoint’s ‘Merge Shapes’ feature and ‘Combine’ to create a rectangle with a circular hole in the middle.

I filled the shape with my chosen blue colour and saved it as a picture that I was able to then insert into my Storyline project. I now had a cover!

In Storyline, the video intro sits on the slide itself (also known as the base layer) and each of the video answers sit on their own layer, so I also put my cover image on each layer too so that the demo would look the same as each layer is shown. I kept my questions simple and in keeping with the circle theme, I added four circles with a question in each. The triggers would be a simple ‘Show Layer’ when a question was clicked.

Now the framework of the demo was set and all I needed to do was record the video introduction along with the answers to each question. I don’t have a proper video camera or equipment, so I used Storyline’s ‘Record Webcam’ from the insert video options and recorded each of my answers using my laptop. As you can see my set up was very basic:

Yes, that’s our spare room which has all our clean washing that we need to put away (everyone has a room like that don’t they?) and my laptop is sitting on the clothes dryer to get the right height but you can’t tell from the clips although the sound quality could be better.

It took a few takes to get my eyes looking straight ahead and for me not to make a mistake with my answers, so it probably took about half an hour all up to record.

As I was putting the demo together, I had an idea that instead of separate video clips, I could include a GIF image of myself that would create the effect of me waiting for the next question. For this it sliced a five second clip of myself from one of my questions and went to a website called http://makeagif.com/ where I uploaded the clip and it created a looping GIF image for me that I could add into my demo.

Unfortunately this idea didn’t turn out as good as I would have liked for a couple of reasons, one was that the quality of the GIF wasn’t the same as the clips so it looked different and secondly I really needed to start and end each clip with the same pose and expression, which I tried to do but it didn’t quite work.

Because of this extra clip, I needed to add an extra layer to my project and the triggers became show the ‘GIF Layer’ after the introduction and then for each layer, it was show the ‘GIF Layer’ when the media completes (i.e. after each video on the layer had finished). So essentially the demo jumps from an answer layer to the GIF layer.

When I placed my videos on the slide and each layer, all I had to do was make sure the cover sat in from to the video file and adjust the position of the video so that my face is roughly in the middle of the circle.

After some testing and adding some animations I was ready to go. All up it took about four hours to put together and while it’s a simple demo, I think it works but you can see for yourself by clicking on the image below to launch the demo:

Let me know what you think and you can see all of my ELH Challenge entries on My Portfolio page.

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August 25, 2015
Showing My Work #7

Often when we talk about our work, we talk in terms of ‘what’ we did. The Showing My Work series of posts aim to also capture the ‘how’ something was done.

E-Learning Heroes Challenge #42 – Smartphone Video. The brief: This week, your challenge is to record, edit, and publish a training video using your smartphone. Choose a topic that allows you to record multiple videos for your project. The focus on this challenge is as much about editing as it is recording.

I almost didn’t do this challenge because I thought I wouldn’t have time but I did, and it turned out to be one of the most fun challenges I’ve participated in. The first thing I needed to figure out was the subject and I gravitated towards my Nespresso coffee machine and I thought about creating some a ‘how to use’ clips – setting up, using and cleaning. In this demo I was also able to put into practice a couple of tips that I picked up from David Anderson and Tom Kuhlmann.

Filming the videos
As the challenge was about using your smartphone to create the videos, I wasn’t sure how mine would turn out as I was using my trusty old iPhone 3G. I have zero equipment for holding the phone steady so I made this little stand using some post-it-notes and bulldog clips:

I also made supports using different combinations of books to give me different heights and angles:

The whole thing was shot in my kitchen. I just moved things out of the way so only the coffee machine was in the shot:

It was pretty basic but it got the job done (I think so anyway).

The visual layout
How a course or module looks, plays an important role as it creates an atmosphere or a context for the person completing it. Literally, it sets the scene.

Tip #1: Have a look at the company website to get some ideas for the look of your module.

So that’s what I did. Here’s a screen shot of the Nespresso website:

See how it’s quite dark – black is a prominent colour and the text is white. As this was going to be some help videos on how to use the machine, I thought it was appropriate to use similar colouring in the demo so that it fits in with the company look.

When creating a piece of eLearning I like to use ‘Master Slides’ because they ensure consistency and they save lots of time. You can have multiple master slides in your project to use when you need them. So, I started with a black background and found a couple of images from a Google search:

But I had a slight problem. See how the image of the cup of coffee doesn’t go right across the screen. It looks like its floating and I needed to do something with that. In this case, I couldn’t just expand it across the slide because it would give a ‘stretched’ look, like this:

Tip #2: Take a grab of part of the image that won’t be affected by stretching.

So I took a snip of a section of the coffee image and saved it as a picture (see the red box below). I used the Snipping Tool on my PC but something like Snagit would also work. Then I inserted the snip image back into the slide, positioned it on the same place where it came from then pulled it across the screen:

The end result is that it looks like one image and there’s no stretched look:

Now I have a Master Slide that I’ve set up once but can use multiple times.

The demo itself
To create the demo, I made one of the screens a ‘home screen’ which has access to each of the three videos. When you click on an iPad screen, it zooms in and the video starts to play and once it’s finished, it zooms out again. It looks like it’s happening on the one screen but each time you click on an iPad, you are actually going to a separate screen that has the video file in it.

The reason I did it this way was because I wanted people to be able to choose which video they watched based on what they need to do and I couldn’t do this and use the zoom function three times on the one screen.

When you look at the ‘Home’ screen you can see what looks like the videos ready to play but they are actually a screen shot of the first frame of the clip. When you click on it and zoom in, you are actually going to a different slide. When the video ends, you automatically go back to the Home screen.

What I learned
One of the things that I learned from this challenge is that you don’t necessarily need a big, high-end production to create some videos to use as performance support. I mean sure, it can look quite slick if you did but I was able to create this demo in just a few hours and it gets the message across. It also taught me to be resourceful and that you can do more than you think you can!

Here’s the demo, you can click on the image to view it:

Let me know what you think and you can see all of my ELH Challenge entries on My Portfolio page.

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October 20, 2014