Go Home Early, Be a Hero: ScreenCam® Shortens the Work Week, earns me accolades
I'm a technology 'evangelist'. What this means is that I am responsible for teaching and training both customers and prospects on what my company's technologies do. Sometimes I'm in front of hundreds of people doing a demo, and sometimes I'm in front of the camera doing a webinar or some other kind of tutorial session to hundreds of people on the Internet. .
In one case, I was scheduled to go down to Cupertino to a computer company and shoot a high-profile pre-taped webinar with a multi-Billion$, very "big deal" business partner. The problem was, they were going to have only 1 hour for me to tape my section. I was supposed to do demos on the entire product line, and the word on the street was that some of the other companies doing webinars were having a TERRIBLE time getting their stuff done. It wasn't hard to see why.
As you might expect, they wanted the demos to be PERFECT, especially since it was going to be taped and put on the Web and heavily promoted. Anyone who does demos or tutorials of complex software KNOWS that even the best demo jock fumbles the ball occasionally. Well, some of the presenters were coming back over and over to do retakes of their demo taping session, and everyone was getting on my case about getting it done within the 1 hour slot, and getting it done right, with no mistakes, no re-takes, no fumbles. That's a pretty tall order!
Well, I knew that the only way to make sure that there were no retakes was to ensure that the tutorial would be guaranteed to be correct each and every time I did it. I struck on the idea of using ScreenCam to pre-record my demos, and then edit them, with audio, to perfection. That way, the demo portions would be 'pre-recorded' and would be abolutely perfect when played.
Here's what I did:
I wrote out a complete storyboard for each of my demos, including what I would say, and what I would show on-screen minute-by-minute.
I then did an audio-only recording of me speaking my script into a microphone, 'pretending' to be doing the demo. We did 5 different demos, so we broke the audio into 5 sections of about 5-6 minutes each.
We edited the audio, taking out all "Uhs" and "Ahh" and any coughing and stuttering. We left all the areas of silence in where normally the audience would be seeing what was happening on screen.
After the audio was PERFECT, I played back the audio over headphones while I used ScreenCam to record the demo into a ScreenCam movie. Boy, its a lot easier to record something when you're not trying to talk at the same time...
In the ScreenCam editor, I edited out all my mistakes (clicking the wrong button, etc.), and then when it was prefect, I added the audio in LAST.
When I exported my completed project, EVERYTHING was perfect - the timing, the audio, the video... it was awesome!
I'd like to add that with ScreenCam's efficiency and ease-of-use with BOTH the recording AND the editing, this was really really easy to do. In fact, some engineers came in to watch me working and were completely blown away by what I was accomplishing. One of them immediately went out and got their own copy to use on his own projects. Well, pretty soon, I was done, and it was time for the acid test.
When I got to Cupertino, I did the 'talking head' portions of my webinar, and I then handed a DVD containing my pre-recorded ScreenCam movies (in both AVI and SWF format) to the video guy. He was stunned, but VERY pleased.
I was back home on time, and the entire staff at the big partner company was super happy they got to go home as well! I finished my taping session in.... 20 minutes.
To this day, there are some people who cannot figure out HOW I was able to do my demos PERFECTLY with no stuttering, no coughing, and no demo errors. Well, it's my secret weapon - ScreenCam.
