Library Subject Guides
Screencasting is recording your screen — a slide presentation for example — whilst talking. The recorded movie file can then be uploaded and shared.
We asked our Artist-in-Residence, Tom, to offer some advice.
The tool you choose depends on what works best for you:
These questions will help you decide which is best for you.
Tidy your desktop. Often it is much easier, if jumping around between windows, to just share your whole Desktop rather than one window, but you don’t want certain file or folder names shared inadvertently.
Turn off notifications. Nothing spoils a great video like a pop-up from a friend mid presentation.
Get your audio as high quality as you can. An external mic, or USB headset with mic can really help with audio clarity, as can being a room with soft-furnishings, curtains etc so that the sound doesn’t become too boxy just because of the acoustics.
You are not the BBC. It is better to record, and be yourself, leaving mistakes in simply because whilst editing videos, adding credits, creating effects etc is possible it is a very slow and arduous process.
Do a test first. Bitter experience has taught me to always do a test first because there is nothing worse than giving a 10 minute presentation to discover it is video only.
Sharing your screen is inevitably a heavily visual way of communicating. But not everybody will be able to see your screen, and even people with perfect eyesight might still struggle to see all the detail in a heavily compressed low resolution streaming video. So what can you do to help paint the picture of what it is you're doing with your mouse pointer?
In a world of huge monitors we've got used to lots of screen real-estate and tiny writing that we can only read when close up. This is fine for working purposes but not so ideal for a demonstration. Before you present, go into your display settings and choose a smaller display resolution. It might take a few tries to find a smaller resolution in the right ratio for your screen — most monitors on campus have a resolution of 1920 x 1080 which you could downscale to 1600 x 900 or even 1360 x 768.
Macs make this process a little easier by having a scale option to control the resolution. Windows also has a scale option, but it works slightly differently by letting you resize text and other items without changing the overall resolution. Try some different options and see what might work best for your needs.
Bear in mind that if you're using a much lower resolution than normal, icons might be in different places, menus might get cut off, and some tasks that require a lot of screen might be harder. But this might serve as a useful reminder that a piece of software might look different on different setups, and not everyone using it will see it in exactly the same way that you do.
If you're recording a screen rather than sharing it live, there are other ways you can make things bigger in the edit, like occasionally zooming in to focus on a particular part of the screen. Try to keep this sort of thing as gentle as possible; you want to orientate, not disorientate. Another thing you can do at this stage is add captions, arrows, and other highlights to make what you're doing even more explicit.
It's not a silent movie, so give a good commentary. If you've ever listened to sport on the radio, think about how it differs to the commentary you get on television and maybe use a few of the tricks: say what's happening; explain what you're clicking on; give as good a description as you can. That way you're giving twice the instruction: not only can people see what you're doing, they can hear what you're doing too.
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Here's a selection of tools, and what Tom made of them:
You can create narrations for PowerPoint slides and export the result as a video. You can also record your screen into PowerPoint (along with audio) and save that as a video too.
If you already have Powerpoint decks they are familiar to work with and the tool works well. If you have Google Slides and work on a PC, you can download your slides as Powerpoint and create your audio-annotated presentation video.
If you've got an up-to-date version of Windows, pressing the Windows key and G together will bring up the Xbox game bar which allows you to record applications using similar controls to PowerPoint. However, it doesn't let you record Windows itself, and it's not currently available on most University desktops.
Google Slides have the ability to insert audio files into each slide but is cumbersome to work with. To be effective, you would have to separately use a tool like Audacity to record voiceovers for each slide. Most mobiles have very good recording tools, but you are then faced with the issue of how those audio files are uploaded to Google Drive.
The tool I am most impressed with for screencasting is Zoom because it is very easy to start, has green screen abilities (you can block out your background), and it automatically has picture-in-picture, which I like.
I have the ability to Save To Cloud or Save To Desktop. This means I can “record and share” quickly, or record and on my own computer edit it. The choice is mine. I like being able to make minor edits, but prefer not to.
Once you Leave The Meeting, the file is saved to your computer and I can then upload that video to YouTube, like I did here:
Equally, one would be able to create a presentation with a colleague, or even to have a number of people involved in a recorded presentation.
If you want to capture a single image from your screen, you don't need a camera. Every operating system has an internal way to take a screenshot:
Pressing the "Print Screen" key (often abbreviated to "Prt Scrn") on your keyboard will take a screenshot of your whole screen (or screens) and save it to your clipboard so that you can paste it elsewhere.
There's also the Snipping Tool, available from the Start menu, where you can select just a section of the screen.
There are multiple keyboard shortcuts on a Mac for capturing a screenshot. Shift + Command + 3 takes a picture of your whole screen, whereas Shift + Command + 4 changes the cursor to a crosshair to allow you to drag an area to take a picture of. Both of these will then be saved to your desktop. Shift + Command + 5 opens a box that gives a range of options for screen captures and screen recording, which can make it the best option for frequent screen capture.
Hold down the Power and Volume Down buttons at the same time for a few seconds to take a screenshot on an Android phone or tablet. The screen will be saved as an image. For more information, see Android's help page.
On newer iPhones you hold the Side button and then click the Volume Up to take a screenshot. Your screenshot will be saved in Photos. See Apple's help page on iOS screenshots for more information (as well as how to do it on older devices).