Shooting Your Laptop Screen: Making your screencasts more exciting

9/01/2015 ISO 1200 Magazine 0 Comments

Screencasts can be an easy and efficient way to show off software. But they can feel boring and dry. Wistia have all seen slow-paced screen captures with droll voiceovers. To break the mold, Chris Lavigne started to film Wistia product shots on a real live laptop.

Some tips for shooting a successful screencast:

Hide your bookmarks and close all of your open tabs. If you're on a Mac, hit the "Do Not Disturb" button to make sure your screencast isn't interrupted by embarrassing text messages from your mom.
Go fullscreen with the app or browser. Fit as much of the product within the screen as you can. Consider enlarging the text or changing the screen resolution to increase legibility on wider shots.
Combine your screencast segments. Screenflow is an awesome program for making simple edits like this. If you have a few screen recordings, combine them all in one timeline, trim the dead space, then export everything out to one long QuickTime file.