In today's episode, I'm going to discuss the of using a script when recording a screen cast. Good day, mate. Hey guys and thanks again for joining me. In today's episode, I'm going to talk about screen casting. So, screen casting, if you're not familiar with that, is a technique for with a voice-over and then sharing that online.
So, I'm sure many of you have watched YouTube videos before where you've wanted to learn how to do something on a and you've jumped on YouTube and typed in the and you've watched a short video of somebody talking you through a specific technique. That's essentially screen casting. And that's actually what we do at Videobites.
So, we create for different systems and software. But, in today's episode, I wanted to talk about different ways of doing this.

The first way is to do it without a script and this is a bit more relaxed, a bit more . The second way to do it is with a script. And, in this video, I want to share the pros and cons of doing it in each of these different ways. So, before we get started, let me show you a couple of examples. I'll give you some background. This is a project that I worked on earlier this year. And, what I did is I created a short for my client. Just to show them what a screen cast video would look like for their software. So, I did this first example without a script. And, when I actually won the business, I obviously created more videos for which I used scripts. And I'll talk about why I did that in a moment. But, let me show you the first example, which is without a script.

Okay, so I want to send this email. Now, quite often, I want to send emails to people in different time zones so the ‘send later’ is really useful for me.I don't want to send them emails in the middle of the night. So, I can use the send later feature. Now, what I would usually do now is click on the send button and send the email, but I want to send it later. So, I'm going to click on the little alarm clock icon here and if you it you can see it says send later.
So, as you probably noticed, there was a few hesitations. I sort of stammered and stuttered a little bit and I didn't really know where I was going with the video, but I kind of had a . So, you can see it was, kind of, quite relaxed.
In this next example, it is exactly the same video, but I used a script. So, quite often I want to send emails to people in different time zones. I don't want to email in the middle of the night or at the weekend, so I can use the ‘send later’ feature to schedule my emails. Now, what I would usually do is just click on the send button and the email would be sent straight away. Okay, so now you've seen a couple of examples. and with a script. I'm going to talk about the advantages and of each technique.

Let's start with unscripted. So, the main advantage of not writing a script for yourscreen cast is that to create the screen cast. Now, obviously that's very dependent on the person who's creating the screen cast. And, one of the disadvantages to using an unscripted technique is that the person doing the video must be the , because obviously they know what they're talking about. But, the main advantage here is that it's a , and technically, you can open screen casting software, like Camtasia, and use that just to capture the screen whilst your subject matter expert is talking and make these little videos. The disadvantage about the technique is you're the person doing the presentation. So, first of all, the person talking must be the expert. There's no way that somebody who didn't know the software would be able to make that video. That's fine if it's just one person and they're the expert and they're going to make the videos and that's done with. But you have to think . What happens if that person leaves the company? What happens if that person's not to make the videos in the future? These are some of the considerations you might want to think about when you're deciding whether to use scripts or not. Another advantage of not writing a script, is that the language is a lot more and it feels like… you know, just like this video that I'm making now. I'm not reading a script. I'm talking, you know, from my mind and I'm thinking about what I'm saying .

So, what are the positives of using script?
Well, I mentioned a couple previously, but the first is that it doesn't have the be the subject matter expert who's doing the voice recording. So, a good example of that is this video, and I'll put a link in the card at the top of the video. But, this video was recorded by a who had no experience in the software whatsoever. He was just reading and recording his voice . And that means that, as long as that voice-over artist is available in the future, I could always use him to record the voice-overs for my scripts. The second advantage of using a script is that there's no or hesitations. You're not going to have people sort of stopping and using bridging words to get them from one sentence to the next because they're not quite sure what they need to say. The sentences are going to be constructed correctly. You're going to use the right . And this can be really important if you're delivering videos to customers where you need the quality to be high.

The other advantage when you're using a script, is that the presenter won't go off on any tangents and quite often that happens, and I know from personal experience from doing this vlog. Quite often as I'm talking, I'll think of things that are and I'll go off on different tangents, which in a vlog format I think is fine, but if you're watching a screen cast where you need to be kind of and you just want to learn some techniques, you don't want to be going off on tangents. So, having a very defined script where you know exactly what's coming next is probably a better way to do it. Another advantage of using a script is that the langage is much more consistent. So you're not going to have variations in the different words that are used. The different phrases that are being used. Obviously, the disadvantage of using a script is that your is going to be longer. So, the technique that we would use is to write the script first. We would record the voice-over from the script, and then, afterwards, we would record the screen cast. And then we would the voice-over with the screen cast, which does take a little bit longer when you're talking about editing. We've got it down to a fine art now, and we can do that quite quickly. But there's the fact that it does take longer.

So, I hope that was useful. If you're interested in seeing the full process that we use for creating videos at Videobites, I'll put a link to that in the description below and you can go and check that out. If you enjoyed the video, please click like. And please subscribe. And if you have any questions or comments, please drop them into the comments box below the video. And I'll see you in the next episode. Cheers.