Maximize Your Benefit of Your Software Demo

As a software product provider or vender, whether you need to make a deal, show progress to your clients, or simply illustrate how your product works, you will need to demo your software product. "We created great software products, and we need better marketing tools to demo our products to make them stand out in this competitive marketplace," is realized by software companies.

Visual software demo has been considered a highly effective way to deliver software information clearly and concisely.

If you are in the list of the following business, software demos are the most compelling way to show the features and benefits of your products to your target market.

• Enterprise Software Applications (ERP, CRM and SCM)
• Software Applications for Healthcare, Financial, Insurance and Retail Verticals
• Consumer Software Applications
• Internet Companies (E-business and Content Websites)

What are the benefits you can get from software demos?

Improve the User Experience and Accelerate the Sales Cycle
The software demos are friendly to users. They make users learn your software faster by showing them guide videos that help increasing product knowledge, reducing confusion and illustrating key benefits.

Demonstrate Product Features and Benefits
Step-by-step demos can show better of the features of your software. Demos with interactivities can show your products in a simulation way. People can learn about your product with ease and it makes your products easy to understand. Just show what your products can do for your clients with a vivid demo.

Deliver Product Information in Multiple Ways
Multiple publish options allow you to increase product exposure in multiple ways. Streaming Flash movie for Web sharing, video for video host such as YouTube, Executable file for best compatibility and it can be can be burnt to a CD or DVD for distribution.

Drive More Traffic to Your Product Website
In your software demo you can add the Website domain or the company logo inside to make more people learn about you company and go to your Website. If it is a Flash demo, you can even put a clickable button to direct users to your website.

So how to create an effective software demo to maximize your benefit?

Be familiar with your software product and create the movie script.
To ensure you do a good performance in the software demo recording, you have to know about your software very well before hand. Creating a software demo is like making a movie. You get to create the movie script. A solid script will follow good marketing and sales techniques. So ensure it properly highlights the features and benefits of the product being demoed. By continually pointing out the features of the product and then going further to explain why they’re beneficial to the users.

Do practice runs with voice recording.
Practice delivery while moving the mouse and speaking. In the software demo you will record, how much time will be spent describing an action, what will you say to highlight a feature, and when will you zoom in for details, you should learn to control the timing. During your rehearsal, ensure that you are speaking clearly and slowly. We all know that a demo with voice can show your idea better. And now screen recorder DemoCreator provides 3 ways to add the audio to software demos: record sound at capture time, record sound at preview time, import audio file to the screen recording with audio editor. You can easily make a voice-over demo.

Add illustration callouts to important actions in recording.
Now the editing features come to be popular in screen recording software. You can delete unwanted video clips, and there are multiple objects to enhance the software demos. For example, you can add zoom and pan effect to show the specific area in details, you can spotlighting an area of the recording, and you can add callouts for important actions. In one word, users can edit the demo by adding the objects to make it explicit.

Publish the software for easy online sharing.
If the technology you are using to build your demo takes forever to load, or asks the viewer to download and install a plug-in, then there would be few people watch your demo. Streaming Flash movie can be the right solution. It enables audience to start watching right away after requesting the video and to jump forward to any part with little playback delay. It can be played with the popular Flash plug-in in web browser, so almost everyone can view it readily.

Summary
To create a demo for your software product, you may go with a professional company that creates software demos, but you can also create the software demo by yourself. You are the one that knows your products very well, and you know the important features which should be shown to your clients, what you need is a tool that helps you do the recording and editing. DemoCreator can be a helpful application for you to create your compelling software demos.

Presentation Expert - Why Make ScreenCast

http://screencast-demo.blogspot.com/2009/09/screen-recording-in-software-teaching.html

Screen Recording in software Teaching and Training

In the production of multi-media courseware presentation, we often need to capture the computer screen actions of operating the application, such as tracking the movement of the mouse and the keystrokes from the keyboard, and so on. That is to make a multimedia animation presentation document from your onscreen activity. And they can be used for software training and self-learning. The research shows that screen recording applied to teaching and training receives a good result.

Multi-media technology like screen recording can be used to create virtualized scenarios combined with driven tasks for breakthroughs of the keys and difficulties in teaching. Students can view the screen recording documents online or on their computer screen. They explore independently, and exchanges opinions mutually. They work as partners to complete learning tasks, while teachers guide and support them in a timely and professional manner.

Let’s say that the teacher is having the course of how to make a good PowerPoint presentation. He shows the students the operating steps and tips with screen recording courseware and then arranges the task.

He prepares a detailed demonstration of software video tutorial recorded from computer screen (Flash video files recorded by DemoCreator). Via multi-media teaching system and network, the software video tutorials can be posted to the learning management website and the desktop machines of students. And students can watch the tutorial and operate the application at the same time, and communicate with teacher and exchange opinions with other students readily. So the teacher has enough time to understand the learning process of more students, and guides them to learn better. For some unexpected operational problems, teachers can produce tutorials and send to students to support their learning online.

There are many benefits of screen recording on computer teaching and training:

1. Fully reflect the subjectivity of students, and drive the entire class to complete the task and explore more.

2. With the video tutorials recorded from screen, it breaks restriction of time and space in learning. Usually, students listen to the teacher in the class, and then go to practice. If they don’t focus their minds, some operations or main points may be unable to grasp. And it is not practical for teachers do repeat the course. Screen recording provides a convenient way to help students to learn and explore, no matter in classes or in extra-curricular.

3. All levels of students are taken in consideration. There are some differences of learning progress among Students. It is more conducive for different levels of students if there are detailed video tutorials. Students who master fast and do some deep exploring while students who master slowly can spend more time and opportunity to consolidate their learning.

4. A big help for teachers. There will be more time for teachers to manage and guide students in computer course learning. And there will be more time for Students to collaborate with peers, and more opportunities for exchanges opinions with their teachers.

5. Screen recording documents can be done by both extra-curricular and in class. The screen recording documents need to be prepared before such computer courses. If necessary, teachers can install the screen recording software to help students deal with some unexpected problems in class. On-site recording and distributing is a necessary complement for pre-class preparation improvement.

6. In favor of post-production and application. The screen recording documents used in class can be improved in accordance with the learning performance of students because of the post-editing and publishing features of screen recorder like DemoCreator. So that teachers can make better screen recording documents, and they can be used for other classes or for the next year.

There is a sample video tutorial to show you how to add audio file to PowerPoint.

Screen Recording Software for Usability Testing

For usability testing on an application, a system or a Website, users are trying to finish the assigned task on computer. It is an important part to recording what users do on screen and publishing the process as videos for analysis. The content of videos can include screen activity such as mouse movement and click, page scroll and keystroke.

A video of these mouse movements, keystrokes, and other activities is most helpful for usability testing. Without good observational skills, it is difficult to remember what happened in the test. A video of screen recording not only helps you recall what happened on the screen, it provides more details to analyze and compare the processes between individuals.

There are various Windows screen recorder available. Most of them are free to try before buy and some of them with simple recording feature are even free. You can choose the one fits your need.

Screen recording software will slows down your computer performance more or less, but it is the best way to do the recording of the desktop compared to camcorder or VCR (Video Cassette Recorder). Besides, now hardware requirements are no longer the hurdle as they used to be.

The following requirements of screen recording software can satisfy most usability testing situations:

Optimize recording settings.

Recording at lower frame rate and lower resolution(like 800×600) in lower color depth(16-bit color)has no obvious impact on system performance. If you can disable your hardware acceleration, you can get better result.

Unobtrusive recording.

Most of the tools will not completely disappear while recording, but they all reduce to a small icon in the toolbar. And now a few screen recorders enable users to hide the system tray icon. So users will not be distracted or feel anxiety by being reminded of recording.

Instant playback.

In this technique usability test, users are doing the assigned task and their screen activities are in recording. When the task is completely they are shown the video and asked to conduct a think aloud. It’s best to watch the video right after the test to minimize forgetting.

Pause, Fast Forward, and Rewind.

Some common video formats are nice because they can be played with video player. Some of the tools use a special video format with special player should have a pause feature and preferably fast-forward and rewind.
Here were a few other features for usability testing but they are not critical.

Record Sound.

If the usability testing is concern with audio, it will be better to get a screen recording application with sound recording feature to do the recording. And now more and more applications supports sound recording from multiple sources such as Microphone, Rear Input, and Stereo Mix. And it can be used to record the interview dialogue after session with participants.

Editing feature.

This enables users to edit callouts to illustrate some special procedures in the recorded video after the test. Some notes can be added according to the after test interview.

Hotkeys.

To minimize futzing in testing sessions, hotkeys for important commands like Record, Pause, Play, and Stop is a useful feature.
Screen recording softwareDemoCreator is mainly designed for creating software tutorials and system demos. However, it can be a useful tool for usability testing. And now more and more requirements of usability test are considered in the design of screen recording software.
Note:

People may think there is one limitation to the software approach - it only records what happens on the screen but users themselves. If you want to learn something from the body language and physical movements of the user then you still need a camcorder. Now the good news is some screen recorders also support the webcam recording and picture-in-picture video. They can record the video of your webcam while recording screen activity.

Screen Recorder Software in Computer Science Teaching

Abstract: This paper introduces the main functions of the screen recorder software. Combined with the characteristics of computer science courses and teaching methods commonly used, screen recorder software is playing a more and more important role. Practice has proved that screen recorder software improves the learning and teaching effectiveness. It is a helpful tool to facilitate teaching of professional computer science courses.

As students of the major of computer science, regardless of the learning of operating system, image processing, web design, animation or database design, we must be familiar with and skilled in using the appropriate software and system.
At present, most schools are equipped with CAI laboratory, but the computer science teaching method is to play the courseware with main text plus pictures and demonstrate software operating by teachers. Teachers guide students to do repeated operations in this way, but it is difficult for students to remember and process by themselves, not to mention to strengthen their knowledge after class or in the experiment. Screen recorder software can record the operating process, and the results can be embedded in teaching courseware. That will be a good solution to the problem.

Screen Recorder Software

Screen recorder software is an application that records the onscreen operating activity as video, or we can called it screen video recording software or screencasting software. There are a lot of screen recorder software, such as DemoCreator, Captivate, and HyperCam. They are with powerful features but simple to use. We will take DemoCreator as an example to explain the main functions of such screen recorder software.


First, it supports the long time onscreen video recording, and you can set the voice recording at the same time.

Second, screen recordings can be generated as EXE file which can be played on any computer without any player installed.

Third, the Flash movie output is a streaming video file of small size, which can be played online instantly.

Fourth, DemoCreator can publish files compliant with AICC/SCORM for Learning Management such as Black Board, SharePoint and Moodle.

Fifth, it enables users to rerecord the voice narration as screen recording. The voice recording process can be separated and user rerecord the narration or import audio file to the screen recording.

Sixth, it is the free to select any recording area of your desktop, full screen, selected window or custom area.

Seventh, users can PAUSE in the process of recording.

Characteristics of Computer Science Courses

There are computer science courses such as database programming, web design, image processing, programming languages and so on. One important thing for all the students is being familiar and skilled in using the related computer software. Software interoperability is a major feature of computer courses.

From the perspective of classroom teaching, the characteristics of computer-based courses are quite different from other courses and it has its own characteristics. Classroom teaching of computer course is often dependent on certain software application, teachers not only train the students on theoretical knowledge, but also operate the process of software and show it to students. Students get in-depth understanding of the software by primarily lectures and repeated use of the application.

Computer Science Curriculum and Experiment

l, the status of classroom teaching

Most computer science courses are based on multimedia teaching method. The essence of multimedia-based teaching is displaying the content of teaching in a more intuitive way, so that students can accept more easily and produce more profound memories.

At present, the commonly used method is to play "text + image" courseware to explain the theory and display software interface to introduce the functions of software. This can show some content that is difficult to show on blackboard with chalk and language. It plays an important role in computer teaching in the early days. However, with the increase of graphical interface software, some software is more complicated to operate. It is difficult to rely solely on this approach which is hard to reflect the operation process of the software.

Another method often used in computer teaching is to process a live demonstration by teachers. The advantage of this approach is intuitive, dynamic, and effective. However, there are downsides as follows: First of all, teachers display the operating by mouse clicking and keyboard typing with poor interactivity. If teachers do not prepare well, or there are some failures in process, it will make the process of interruption or repeated presentation. In that case, students are difficult to understand the steps absolutely correct;
Second, CAI laboratory must have all the software installed, then the machine is not easy to maintain, and the software also slows down the machine performance, so that it will lags machines when teachers are in the presentation. This reduces the effectiveness of the demonstration.

2, The status of experimental teaching

Experimental teaching plays a vital role in the whole process of computer course teaching. Mastering the theoretical knowledge of computer is not enough in learning computer science courses. Experimental teaching is to train students to use computer applications to solve real problems. The significance of computer experiment teaching is so important, that has been recognized by the whole education sector. There are two mainly used experimental teaching methods for computer science course:

The first method is broadcasting the screen recording to all students, and then they do the experiment through their memories. The inadequacy of this method is that students can only see but can not follow the operation. It is very difficult for students to remind the processing steps when they do it alone. In the experiment, teachers have to guide students in individual counseling, repeating the operation so many times. It is inevitable that guidance teacher can not take care of all the students. It is a waste of teachers’ work. The class time is so limited that teachers can not solve all the operational problems for students, thus affecting the effectiveness and the progress of teaching.

For schools with better experimental conditions, teachers demo steps through the projector in the laboratory, and students can solve the problem by following the operation. That is the second teaching method for computer science course.
However, because of the difference of computer basic, earning method and learning ability for all students, some students can keep up with the teaching process, while others can not. So teachers need to repeat the same presentation, or only take care of the students of middle level. Some students can not learn as much as they can, and some students can not keep up the situation. This also
impacts the effectiveness of teaching.

There are some difficulty in classroom and laboratory teaching. The teaching conditions are improving and teachers are trying to do better, but there are still some deficiencies. These deficiencies are not only reflected in the classroom and laboratory teaching. For operational content, the students are difficult to review and self-learn after class through the difficult text + pictures courseware.

The screen recorder software in the computer science teaching

Screen recorder software is easy to record the onscreen operating into a video or EXE file, and the process of recording and playback can be set arbitrarily. It plays an extraordinary role for teaching computer science courses.

First of all, it totally demonstrates the whole process of software operation. The process is intuitive and dynamic. It makes teaching can achieve a better result. Besides, it solves the problems of "text + image" courseware.

Second, teachers do not have pay attention on screen, and it is free to set up suspensions in recording. That avoids confusion in the process of presentation, and the phenomenon of disruption because of the operational errors or system failures. It ensures the progress of the course.

Third, CAI classrooms do not have to have all the software applications installed. It makes the machine easy to maintain and it does not reduce the performance of the machine.

Fourth, teachers distribute the recorded files of software operating to students in experiment. Students control playback speed and progress by themselves. In this way, it make that students can learn more based on their level, but also bring teachers out of duplication of effort.

Fifth, the recorded results will be (with the voice narration) uploaded to the teaching site. Students can review the document online. For energetic students, they can learn more by themselves.

In general, screen recorder software like DemoCreator enhances the effectiveness of teaching of computer science courses in all aspects. Multimedia-aided teaching is unique, advanced, and highly effective, but not suitable for all the teaching content. How to achieve optimal teaching effect? It should be based on the rational use of the actual needs to achieve the best results. Multi-media-assisted teaching and traditional teaching complements each other when they became Organic combination. Appropriate use of instructional media can fully mobilize the enthusiasm of learning. It cultures innovative ability of students with enhanced learning efficiency. Practice has proved that the screen recorder software bring good results for computer course teaching, no matter in classroom teaching, laboratory teaching and self-learning after school.

Top Desktop Recording Tools

A question I'm often asked when people are putting together their training content, is "What screen recorder should I use?".

I've compiled a short list of screen recorders that I know a bit about. Please do add more detail,
plus your own experience and suggestions in the comments section as I know there are a lot more on the market, free or otherwise. These are not product reviews, my post is just intended to make people aware of these products. Each person has a different idea of 'easy to use', so it's worth shopping around and making use
of those free trials:

For PC Users:

• JingProject
  Free 5 minute screen recordings with audio and a little Jing branding, which can be exported to .swf. You can also take screen shots which produce as .png. Plus, there's a
  Pro version for USD$15/yr with no branding, and more options including upload
  direct to YouTube and produce as MPEG-4 (or .swf). Super easy to use but you're
  restricted on editing/effects.
  
• DemoCreator
  Free 30 days trial available. Recording your desktop with audio, which can be publish
  to .swf or .exe. You can do the editing after recording. There are enough objects for you to decorate your recording and presentation. It is an easy-to-use screen recorder application with nice editing feature.
  
• Camtasia Studio 6
  Free 30-day trial available. It's quick to get started recording your interaction with the screen be it a PowerPoint or demo. Record or overlay audio, add effects and Picture-in-Picture (PIP) to produce high quality, professional looking videos. Once you get used to the timelines lay-out, they are easy to edit, cut and add to. Output to multiple different formats.
  
• Adobe Captivate
  Offer a free 30-day trial as well. There's an on-going debate between Camtasia and Captivate users as to which is better. Some say editing is easier in Captivate, but I think it may just come down to personal choice. Captivate is a winner when it comes to creating interactive content and instead of timelines, interactions are stored as a series of screens.
  

For Mac Users:

• Jing
  (As above)
  
• Screenflow
  
  Built for Mac OS X Leopard, it comes highly recommended for smooth captures and a wide variety of editing tools. Output screen recordings as QuickTime movie. Screenflow is a 'no go' on Power Mac.
  
• iShowU HD
  A very powerful piece of software, but has an optional low CPU usage mode. Once created
  sceencasts can be uploaded directly to YouTube, Blip.TV and other online video services.
  
  
• Copernicus
  (Danicsoft)
  Free product that captures screen and video, but no audio.
  

Free, web-based screen
recorders i.e. nothing to download:

ScreenToaster - designed to capture your screen activity, audio and images, then publish and share in blogs and websites. Works in all browsers.

Screenjelly - allows you to quickly record your screen and voice then share it via a link in Twitter and other social networks

Record Screen Activity: Take Screenshots or Full Motion Recording

There are two recording modes in DemoCreator: Take screenshots and Full motion recording. What recording mode you need? It depends on what
activity on the screen you want to record. For standard application, Take screenshots recording is nice. For really changes on screen, full motion recording is better option.

Take screenshots:

This recording mode works great at recording standard application like MS Word, Excel or Internet Explorer, where there's not a lot of animation and moving images. This mode will do very little impact on your PCs performance. With this option, you can select to record more actions like cursor movement and keystroke and edit them later. Furthermore, you can generate Auto-text and mouse click animations to illustrate your screen recording.

The recording movie is divided as multiple slides, and slides are generated based on the mouse clicks and keystrokes. Basically, one mouse click or a series of keystrokes generates a slide. So each slide lasts only a few seconds. You can click and drag and edit various objects for your recording.

You can adjust the length of the slide and its show order and edit it in the time line, but it may cause some synchronization problem between video and audio. It is recommended that you record the audio with the audio editor after editing the slides and there is no more adjusting to the time line. If there is no audio in the recording, it is free to adjust the editing objects and the time line.

Full motion recording:

Full motion recording will record the really changes on your screen. It records the onscreen changes even you don't move your mouse or there is no keystroke. So it can be used to record some playing animation movie (SWF, FLV, AVI) and some actions like dragging and scrolling on screen. It records a few screenshots in a second and combines them as a movie. The default recording setting is 25 FPS(Frame per Second) . Record a large area with full motion recording mode need to collect a lot of data and it consume much resource of the computer. If the computer can not support that high FPS, the FPS will be lowered automatically. So to improve the recording effect, you can do some settings to optimize the computer performance.

If you are going to capture full motion video, disable your computer's hardware acceleration beforehand. That will make your computer runs more smoothly in recording. There is a screencast to show you how to disable hardware acceleration:

A basic rule is that if there are many screen actions like dragging and scrolling, or there is animation movie on the desktop, Full motion recording is better option to show your recording. But if you want a smaller streaming movie and more auto-generated editing objects to decorate your screen recording, Take screenshots recording mode can fit your needs better. To show the necessary actions like dragging and scrolling actions but also reduce the file size, you can combine the two recording modes together with the Import project feature.

More tips to make effective screencasts

Record Desktop - Record any area of your desktop

DemoCreator provides flexible recording area selections when you start to record the desktop:
Application option to record actions on a selected application window;
Custom Size to record actions within a specified area on the screen;
Full Screen to record actions on the entire screen.

Which portion on the desktopdo you need to record? It depends on what you want to show. The main principle is to make small streaming movie to show what we want to show. Unnecessary portions on the screen recording make the final movie file bigger, increasing both the time required in loading and playing. So we will just select the necessary area for desktop recording. There are some rules to select the recording area of your desktop:

Record application window

If the software operation you want to record is in one window and there are few dialog boxes or pop-ups that show up out of the recording scope of the recording window, select this option is fine. Dialog boxes and pop-ups will only display if they are in front of and smaller than the main window. Anything which extends outside of the boundary of the main window will be cut off. Try to run your application to see would it be OK to make the application window as the recording area. Also keep in mind that the default size of the publishing movie will be the same as your application window. To make it play in a smaller playing area, it is recommended to restore down the application window and do your recording. Or you can change the publishing dimension in the setting dialog box. After that, you may add the zoom objects to zoom in to emphasize the details for the resized slides. Select the application you want to record on your desktop, and snap to it, then you can start your recording.

Record the custom size

If you want to record a part of your desktop activity, you can customize the recording area. Any operation like the mouse curse and keystroke on that area will be captured. This is an easy way to set the recording region and aspect ratio for your video and make it right for the player or Web page where you want to show the movie. Furthermore, there are some pre-set dimensions for desktop recording: 800*600, 640*480, 400*300. Do some recording rehearsal to make sure you getting everything you want to show to happen inside that region. You set the exact size by typing in the pixels data in the setting entry, and you can drag the rectangle to position the recording area.

Recording full screen

This option is for you to capture everything that happens on your entire screen. Compare with small area recording, it will take up more computer resource and create a bigger file. However, that if there is a really high resolution monitor for full screen recording, you probably don’t want to create a video file that has to be played back at the same resolution in a really big player. If possible, lower your screen resolution before you start to record your desktop. For example, if you use the screen resolution of 1026*768 or higher, you can adjust the resolution as 800*600 and do you recording. And if you want it to show in a smaller player like 640*480, you can resize the movie dimension as 80% of the original one. So you can publish the video of smaller dimension, but it could be a little blurring. However, you can add the zoom object to magnify the import area of your recorded desktop to show the specific details. You can even set the zoom objects through all your recording slides.

Screencast: How to lower the monitor resolution

More tips to make effective screencasts