Hmm, it’s a good screencast, but there’s a bit too much movement. I found myself feeling almost sea-sick half-way through. Also, the girl’s voice sounds somewhat over-excited.
I also think they got their wizard process backwards. Get people to upload their images first – then they’ll complete the rest of the signup process because they’ve already invested into the site by putting “their stuff” on it. On the other hand, if you present people with a form asking them to type in a biography first, it’s not that unlikely that they’ll abandon the process at this point.
Someone needs to take the expresso away from the girl doing the screencast – she is in hyperdrive.
Keith
on 05 Feb 09
Right in the sweet spot. We also tell folks who are creating screencasts a few things:
1 – For every minute of screencast, plan on 1 hour of planning, recording, and production time to get it “just right.”
2 – Screencasts should be active. Don’t tell people things and not show them. You should be doing something not saying something.
3 – Ideally you want your screencasts around 3 or 4 minutes with 5 minutes on the high end. If you need more time, look at the entirity of your topic and make several short videos of it.
This followed all three rules exceptionally well. It looked “just right” and had a great style. While the pacing might have seemed fast, it was just a product overview and was keeping the feature demo’s coming fast and furious which was great. Finally, it was a little over 4 minutes long. With all the cool things going on in the video it hardly seemed like 4 minutes.
I’d love to know how that did that motion blur effect. I though it added a compelling dynamism to the presentation.
ML
on 05 Feb 09
Someone needs to take the expresso away from the girl doing the screencast.
Yeah, it is fast at times. I wonder if she was forced to do the voiceover after the video (screens part) was already edited together. That’s when you wind up rushing just to keep up. (And why I prefer to do narration first and then screens second.)
Jake
on 05 Feb 09
Yeah, I’m not a huge fan of her cadence. She tries to make it sound like she’s actually going through the system when the video was clearly edited together (very nicely) beforehand. It comes off sounding a bit fake.
Brenton
on 05 Feb 09
Seems like a neat service. I’d try it if they allowed you to hyperlink your images. (I’m an interactive/UX guy. Stills don’t say much about my work).
I’m probably not in their target market though. If I need a portfolio, I can build it myself fast enough to make their $10/mo package look silly.
Good screencast. I hate screencasts that move really slowly through long boring processes and explain everything in a lot of detail. The speed of this one and the girls voice made it a bit more ‘exciting’.
It also helps to have a good product to show off.
Kevin H
on 05 Feb 09
Definitely some good post-production work there in either After Effects or Motion. Excellent pacing. Too slow and people will GET BORED!!!
Great pacing. I’m sick of screencasts that ramble and I have to flick through and fast forward. This is fast enough to ensure you have to keep watching and not detailed enough to bore you.
John Kranz
on 05 Feb 09
Nice screencast. I notice it was done on a Mac, so I have to ask—what program was used to create those mouse click special effects and to drill into a certain area (zoom in effect). I’m not aware of any tools that can do that…Camtasia Studio is Windows-based only…so if anyone has any idea, please post here. Thanks!
Daniel
on 05 Feb 09
It is a good screencast, if a little too fast. One thing I noticed though, is that I had no idea what to expect the end result to be (likely that’s because I saw the video here in SvN and not on Krop’s own page). I figured I was going to see something pretty neat and cool, but I didn’t know how the portfolio page would look, what it would contain, etc.. So I felt like a co-pilot flying blind. I.e. it’s a nice screencast, showing you how to get from a standing start to “the goal”, but in this context (SvN) I didn’t know the goal.
Since the video is meant for embedding, and semi-viral distribution, Krop could possibly have put in a teaser at the start, to show where it was all going.
@John Kranz
maybe they’ve used ScreenFlow. But I honestly don’t know if it has that styl of cursor “callout”. Either way, ScreenFlow is pretty awesome.
Stilgar
on 06 Feb 09
There’s a Camtasia Studio for Mac in the works, might be worth waiting for.
Steve
on 06 Feb 09
I thought it was obvious that it goes fast to stop the viewer from being bored. I followed it completely easily. Great site execution too.
I think the screencast is ok, but the audio editing was so atrocious I had to stop it three quarters of the way after it continued to not improve.
What I’m hearing is lots of short audio segments pieced together in order to speed up the whole video. If you listen to it you can hear where one clip stops and the next starts…. it very much does not flow.
“hello I’m sarah.”
“for krop dot com.”
“and today I’m going to quickly run you through our creativity database.”
“jumping right in.”
“I’m going to create an account.”
“just the basics.”
“name email and password.” etc.
Granted, it’s entirely possible that this is how “Sarah” talks, but it sounds very unnatural to me.
This is usually done when your source material is not very good (lots of ums and ahs), or if you simply want to cut “whitespace” to speed up the overall flow without actually speeding up the audio (people appreciate chipmonk even less). But just like with writing and page layout, you need whitespace in audio, and I think one would be better off editing out parts rather than trying to fit everything in.
Funny everyone noticed it is way too fast, so it have to be so.
For me there is something stressful in her voice too, giving not a best overall result.
Maybe they wanted to make a signup process a breeze, and having failed they decided to present it in fast-forward mode?
The audio does have an unnatural quality. Speaking in sentence fragments is probably normal for most people most of the time, but there seems little excuse for the practice in this screen cast—particularly after lavishing so much time on the video.
Ok, I’ll throw a contrary opinion in here for spice – I actually don’t think it’s too fast, I like that the actual interactions and typing is artificially sped up. It gives you just a sense of the amount of data that has to go into making a folio, rather than either 1) a giant real time snoozefest that clocks in every single input in real time or 2) brushing away long pages of input and pretending the process is much shorter than it actually is.
It’s similar to the iPhone tv commercials that whip through screens faster than real time and have the “screens sped up for tv” fine print at the bottom.
Personally I think it runs at a nice clip, 3 minutes is about what I advise when creating a screencast for a client. More than 3 minutes for a front-page video and you start to lose viewers and the whole point is to get them to the end of the video and the call-to-action.
I use a slightly laborious process of recording the audio separately, chopping it up (often into 1-sentence blocks), then merging each sentence precisely into the video. Long-winded but gives perfect results. Always do a noise-removal step, that way you don’t hear the slight audio problems that @Marcello noted.
The zooms can be added by any decent screencasting package (I prefer CamTasia), high-lights are a great tool too to emphasise just the one thing the user should pay attention to.
If you’re making your own and you want to see known-good examples, feel free to crib from the examples on my site.
Ian.
This discussion is closed.
About Matt Linderman
Now: The creator of Vooza, "the Spinal Tap of startups." Previously: Employee #1 at 37signals and co-author of the books Rework and Getting Real.
Daniel Tenner
on 05 Feb 09Hmm, it’s a good screencast, but there’s a bit too much movement. I found myself feeling almost sea-sick half-way through. Also, the girl’s voice sounds somewhat over-excited.
I also think they got their wizard process backwards. Get people to upload their images first – then they’ll complete the rest of the signup process because they’ve already invested into the site by putting “their stuff” on it. On the other hand, if you present people with a form asking them to type in a biography first, it’s not that unlikely that they’ll abandon the process at this point.
Daniel
Jesse Wolgamott
on 05 Feb 09I loved the way it zoomed in on the page—made a somewhat boring screencast better.
Anyone have experience making that effect happen and want to share how they did it?
Henrik Lied
on 05 Feb 09Seems like a good product as well.
Anonymous Coward
on 05 Feb 09Nice screencast….but way, way too fast.
Jay Owen
on 05 Feb 09Someone needs to take the expresso away from the girl doing the screencast – she is in hyperdrive.
Keith
on 05 Feb 09Right in the sweet spot. We also tell folks who are creating screencasts a few things:
1 – For every minute of screencast, plan on 1 hour of planning, recording, and production time to get it “just right.”
2 – Screencasts should be active. Don’t tell people things and not show them. You should be doing something not saying something.
3 – Ideally you want your screencasts around 3 or 4 minutes with 5 minutes on the high end. If you need more time, look at the entirity of your topic and make several short videos of it.
This followed all three rules exceptionally well. It looked “just right” and had a great style. While the pacing might have seemed fast, it was just a product overview and was keeping the feature demo’s coming fast and furious which was great. Finally, it was a little over 4 minutes long. With all the cool things going on in the video it hardly seemed like 4 minutes.
Great work and thanks for sharing.
Matt
on 05 Feb 09Echo Jesse’s comments…
I’d love to know how that did that motion blur effect. I though it added a compelling dynamism to the presentation.
ML
on 05 Feb 09Someone needs to take the expresso away from the girl doing the screencast.
Yeah, it is fast at times. I wonder if she was forced to do the voiceover after the video (screens part) was already edited together. That’s when you wind up rushing just to keep up. (And why I prefer to do narration first and then screens second.)
Jake
on 05 Feb 09Yeah, I’m not a huge fan of her cadence. She tries to make it sound like she’s actually going through the system when the video was clearly edited together (very nicely) beforehand. It comes off sounding a bit fake.
Brenton
on 05 Feb 09Seems like a neat service. I’d try it if they allowed you to hyperlink your images. (I’m an interactive/UX guy. Stills don’t say much about my work).
I’m probably not in their target market though. If I need a portfolio, I can build it myself fast enough to make their $10/mo package look silly.
Schoonzie
on 05 Feb 09Good screencast. I hate screencasts that move really slowly through long boring processes and explain everything in a lot of detail. The speed of this one and the girls voice made it a bit more ‘exciting’.
It also helps to have a good product to show off.
Kevin H
on 05 Feb 09Definitely some good post-production work there in either After Effects or Motion. Excellent pacing. Too slow and people will GET BORED!!!
Peter Cooper
on 05 Feb 09Great pacing. I’m sick of screencasts that ramble and I have to flick through and fast forward. This is fast enough to ensure you have to keep watching and not detailed enough to bore you.
John Kranz
on 05 Feb 09Nice screencast. I notice it was done on a Mac, so I have to ask—what program was used to create those mouse click special effects and to drill into a certain area (zoom in effect). I’m not aware of any tools that can do that…Camtasia Studio is Windows-based only…so if anyone has any idea, please post here. Thanks!
Daniel
on 05 Feb 09It is a good screencast, if a little too fast. One thing I noticed though, is that I had no idea what to expect the end result to be (likely that’s because I saw the video here in SvN and not on Krop’s own page). I figured I was going to see something pretty neat and cool, but I didn’t know how the portfolio page would look, what it would contain, etc.. So I felt like a co-pilot flying blind. I.e. it’s a nice screencast, showing you how to get from a standing start to “the goal”, but in this context (SvN) I didn’t know the goal.
Since the video is meant for embedding, and semi-viral distribution, Krop could possibly have put in a teaser at the start, to show where it was all going.
@John Kranz
maybe they’ve used ScreenFlow. But I honestly don’t know if it has that styl of cursor “callout”. Either way, ScreenFlow is pretty awesome.
Stilgar
on 06 Feb 09There’s a Camtasia Studio for Mac in the works, might be worth waiting for.
Steve
on 06 Feb 09I thought it was obvious that it goes fast to stop the viewer from being bored. I followed it completely easily. Great site execution too.
Marcello
on 06 Feb 09I think the screencast is ok, but the audio editing was so atrocious I had to stop it three quarters of the way after it continued to not improve.
What I’m hearing is lots of short audio segments pieced together in order to speed up the whole video. If you listen to it you can hear where one clip stops and the next starts…. it very much does not flow.
“hello I’m sarah.” “for krop dot com.” “and today I’m going to quickly run you through our creativity database.” “jumping right in.” “I’m going to create an account.” “just the basics.” “name email and password.” etc.
Granted, it’s entirely possible that this is how “Sarah” talks, but it sounds very unnatural to me.
This is usually done when your source material is not very good (lots of ums and ahs), or if you simply want to cut “whitespace” to speed up the overall flow without actually speeding up the audio (people appreciate chipmonk even less). But just like with writing and page layout, you need whitespace in audio, and I think one would be better off editing out parts rather than trying to fit everything in.
Jakub Pawlowicz
on 06 Feb 09Funny everyone noticed it is way too fast, so it have to be so. For me there is something stressful in her voice too, giving not a best overall result.
Maybe they wanted to make a signup process a breeze, and having failed they decided to present it in fast-forward mode?
ratchetcat
on 06 Feb 09The audio does have an unnatural quality. Speaking in sentence fragments is probably normal for most people most of the time, but there seems little excuse for the practice in this screen cast—particularly after lavishing so much time on the video.
Mark Eric
on 06 Feb 09I liked it, she sounded natural and inviting. Looks like a cool product for photographers.
Phil
on 06 Feb 09Omit words. The repetition of “so,” at the start of every sentence in the last few seconds got annoying. It was brisk but kind of exciting.
Mattijs Naus
on 07 Feb 09Technically very nicely done. However, it moves way too fast for my taste. Starting feeling kinda nauseous after two minutes…
Al Abut
on 07 Feb 09Ok, I’ll throw a contrary opinion in here for spice – I actually don’t think it’s too fast, I like that the actual interactions and typing is artificially sped up. It gives you just a sense of the amount of data that has to go into making a folio, rather than either 1) a giant real time snoozefest that clocks in every single input in real time or 2) brushing away long pages of input and pretending the process is much shorter than it actually is.
It’s similar to the iPhone tv commercials that whip through screens faster than real time and have the “screens sped up for tv” fine print at the bottom.
Ian Ozsvald
on 08 Feb 09Personally I think it runs at a nice clip, 3 minutes is about what I advise when creating a screencast for a client. More than 3 minutes for a front-page video and you start to lose viewers and the whole point is to get them to the end of the video and the call-to-action.
I use a slightly laborious process of recording the audio separately, chopping it up (often into 1-sentence blocks), then merging each sentence precisely into the video. Long-winded but gives perfect results. Always do a noise-removal step, that way you don’t hear the slight audio problems that @Marcello noted.
The zooms can be added by any decent screencasting package (I prefer CamTasia), high-lights are a great tool too to emphasise just the one thing the user should pay attention to.
If you’re making your own and you want to see known-good examples, feel free to crib from the examples on my site.
Ian.
This discussion is closed.