Dealing with end-users or simply beginners is not always a pleasant and easy experience for some techs. I personally sometimes get irritated when I have to explain for a thousandth time a simple concept I have already clarified in layman’s terms a day or two ago. While I was working in Technical Support where dealt with users all the time, one of the intricacies of helping people over the phone or via e-mail was the lack of picture–if only I could show them what I wanted, or see what was on their screen, then it would have been much easier to find the problem and solve it. Lack of picture was also a problem when communicating with my developer colleagues, who were thousands of miles away from the office. And in one of those moments, when we were excitingly discussing a bug that appeared on my machine but the developers did not understand what it was and could not reproduce it on their machines. So, a small movie that captured what appeared on my screen was exactly the solution we needed to understand each other. This wasn’t my first encounter with screencasting but was one of those cases when one sees the practical benefits of a technology that sounds so distant and difficult.

I do not yet consider myself an expert in screencasting. Actually, I have done no more than 5 or 10 short movies and I do not think they will get an Oscar–if there were Oscars for screencasts. Either way, I learned a lot about screencasting, and I am afraid that I am getting addicted to it. And believe me, making a simple screencast is not difficult at all, but it can be so useful and impressive for others! While making a screencast to answer every support ticket is hardly worth the effort, making a couple of screencasts for the most common questions makes sense and pays off in the long-run, especially when 50% of the issues in the tickets are the same.

But maybe it is time to explain what screencasting means. Do not get stressed by the name “screencasting”–although it sounds complex, actually it is very simple. Screencasting (also screen casting or screen captures and varieties) is creating demonstration movies for software (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screencast). The movie is created by recording the screen activity of a piece of software program–either by capturing sequences of screenshots, linking them to each other and (optionally) adding audio narration, or by directly filming the activities onscreen as a continuous movie.

I bet you got scared by the definition and already think that only the equipment for a screencast might be worth thousands of dollars, but in reality you need only special software (and there are some good programs that are free) to make a decent screencast. If you want to add an audio narration, you might need a microphone that is a bit better than some of the cheap ones out there, but most microphones on the market are fine for the purpose. There is a newer trend in screencasting–to add movie frames in addition to screen activity, such as the narrator speaking about what is going on in the screencast. If you decide to try something like this, then you might need a camera, but remember, a screencast is a demonstration movie clip, not a full-length film with people and places in it.

Uses of Screencasting
You might still wonder what the practical benefits of screencasting are and where it can be used. The quick answer is that only your imagination is the limit for the uses of screencasting. The paragraphs above implied one of the many possible uses of screencasting–to create demonstration movies to answer frequent tech support issues. This is hardly the only possible use of screencasting. Since screencasting combines both film and audio to show what is happening on screen, it is an extremely useful medium to communicate knowledge and ideas and can be used for the demonstration of software features, for all kinds of e-learning, for HOW-TOs for a particular program or task, for reporting bugs in software, and more.

The fact that screencasting is gaining popularity is hardly surprising. What’s more, neither screencasting nor the technologies it employs are new. There has been screencasting software (i.e. – Lotus ScreenCam) for more than a decade, not to mention the existence of audio and screen capture techniques that have existed for more than twenty or thirty years. But one of the reasons why screencasting became so popular recently is the fact that due to their size (5, 10, 50MB or more) screencasts could not distributed easily before broadband Internet became commonplace around the globe.

Although I know from the start that any attempt to take a complete list of the possible uses of screencasting without skipping an important use is bound to fail, so I will show you just some of the most common uses of screencasting. This rundown of screencasting basics and a classification list of screencasting “genres”, made by Jon Udell, who is one of the emblematic names of screencasting, goes to show some of the basic popular areas of screencasting:

• Commercial Demos – I am not sure if this is the first or the most common use of screencasts, but certainly it is a major use and one of the reasons why screencasting became so popular. Commercial demonstrations are intended to be shown to a target audience to show what a marvel a given piece of software or a site is. I bet that this is the most expensive type of screencast because when it is part of the sales and marketing campaign of a given company, the quality of the pictures has to be outstanding, and very often, the audio narration is recorded in a studio by professional actors, rather by the user himself.
  


• Tutorials and HOW-TOs – Tutorials and HOW-TOs are an essential use of screencasting–it looks that screencasting was invented just to make it possible to show, in a couple of actions rather than in lengthy paragraphs of text, how to perform a given task. And the possibility to add audio narration to explain exactly what is happening on-screen makes it the perfect tool when you have to repeat a given lecture or a course many times, addressing audiences of hundreds and thousands of people. It is obvious that for e-learning and distance learning screencasting is a really valuable technology.
  


• Instructional Movies – While tutorials and HOW-TOs are generally short (from 5 minutes to half an hour) and concentrate on a particular task only, technology does not limit the size of a screencasts, and it could run the length of a feature film. But there are some guidelines of long screencasts–they must be made into logical smaller sections, otherwise the audience will hardly have the patience to see it at once from start to end. The advantage of full-length instructional movies over tutorials is that in a movie, you can include a broader range of topics in a logical sequence, while the tutorials (even if you number them as Part 1, Part 2, etc.) generally examine only one specific topic, which sometimes may require some prior background knowledge about the topic.
  


• Software Reviews – I don’t think that anybody will dispute the advantage of a screencast over a textual description only, when reviews are concerned. It is so much easier to communicate an idea when you can show the stuff you are reviewing.
  


• Reporting Bugs – Although this stuff is not abundant on the Net, screencasting to record and report bugs is a really valuable tool. As my experience shows, bugs are tricky in two aspects – there are bugs that occur only occasionally and under specific circumstances, and therefore are not always easy to reproduce. And sometimes, even the bug is reproducable but it is hard to fix, developers just find it easier to deny its existence than to fix it. But when one can present a movie with exactly what is happening, then it is visible what is wrong, and if there is a will, there is a way to fix it.

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