Less is More, at least with regards to resolution

I was working this weekend with a colleague to deploy a video for a customer, and an interesting problem arose.  The person who did the screen cast (a third person) had done it at a resolution of 1280x1024.  My colleague was complaining that the video was fuzzy on his laptop, which has a 1440x900 resolution.

The problem, of course, is that the video was captured at a higher vertical resolution, and so the video gets scaled down to fit the laptop.  While normal "real world" video looks OK when scaled, screen casts look really bad when they are close to but not 100% resolution.  (They look bad when they are a lot less than 100% resolution, but then your expectations are that the screen is shrunk).

Figuring out the right resolution is a tough one, as you need to know the audience's capabilities.  Traditionally, people have adopted 1024x768 as a sort of lingua franca of resolution, probably because the LCD projector population seems (or maybe seemed) stuck there.  But that is a terribly limiting resolution, something that almost nobody has had as their primary display for 10 years now.

Personally, I default to 720p, which is 1280x720.  It's short in the vertical dimension, but it is an official resolution supported by YouTube (which is a popular destination for videos).  It can be viewed on almost any modern computer (the square 1280x1024, or the typical laptop widescreen).  But it is still limiting.

All in all, a lot of trade-offs in choosing the resolution. But the less you can get away with, the more people you'll make happy!

The Generic Demo Script

A lot of good demo videos follow a very similar pattern.  Here is a template you can use.  You may not be original, but you'll have a strong structure for your demo.

1. Start with a day in the life

You want to show the challenges and frustrations of people who do not have your product.  This is usually very quick, just a few sentences.  A generic patter looks like:

If you're like most people, businesses, soccer moms, etc., you have some substandard way of doing things -- whatever people did before your product. But following this process is painful in some specific way, and you may totally fail because of something our product uniquely solves.

2. Introduce the solution

Now that the viewer recognizes themselves in the day in the life, you need to tell them that your solution will solve their problems -- a very, very brief taste of what it's like once they have your product.  A patter can go like:

Name of your product is very short summary of what it does -- must relate to pain described above. And because of some of its unique features, it is easy/fast/best/perfect.

3. Overview of the product

Before you start going through the various features, show a bit of the application as a whole to give a sense of how easy it is to use, how wonderful its design is, etc.  Just ease people into the program before taking them on a journey.

4. Tour of the product

You've told them what benefits your product has, now you have to show them how it delivers on that promise.  This is typically done with a day in the life scenario exercising 3 to 5 of the best features in the product.  There's no typical patter here, but it tends to cycle in loops of showing a feature, explaining how the feature solves the problem identified earlier, and how the user's life is better because of the feature.  Rinse and repeat.

5.  Explain how life is better now

Here we state how the products benefits (which we repeat from earlier, more or less) have made the user's life so much better.  Just a couple of sentences.

6.  Call to action

Buy it.  Trial it.  Download it.  Whatever.  One or two sentences.


And that's it, you have a complete 3 to 5 minute demo of your product.

Mouseposé

One interesting utility for the Mac I discovered is Mouseposé, which gives you incredible control over animating the screen on mouse clicks, movements, key presses, etc.  I plan on using it with Camtasia, which is lacking that feature.  And Mouseposé is fairly inexpensive, too.

http://www.boinx.com/mousepose/overview/

Introduction to this blog

Like a lot of people in the software industry, I need to make demo recordings of software.  But figuring out how is not as easy as it should be. You can find help on making movies and commercials, but they are aimed at live action.  You can find help on screen capture programs, like Camtasia, but they are aimed at the mechanics of the software.  Very little help exists in how to produce, from start to finish, a really great demo video.

And so this blog.  I'm going to call out resources I find, tricks that I develop or come across, and ideas I generate for how to make a really good video.  The focus is on how to script a demo, techniques for capturing demo flows, audio processing, video editing, and assembling the final video.

As time goes on, I hope to create the kind of how-to guide that will make it easier for folks to step into the world of creating demo videos and be able to create great content with ease.

I hope you'll join me!