Planning your Screencasts

The level of scripting required for your screencasts will depend on the type of screencast recording you are doing. For example, if you are talking over images or slides and know pretty much word-for-word what you want to say, then a highly scripted text might be necessary.

However, if you are screencasting other things like tutorials using a specific program where what you say is contextual upon the actions happening on the screen, then it may be better to have a more flexible written script with guiding dot points more than entire lines.

If you are also using a webcam as part of your screencasting setup, reading from a page the entire time might not necessarily be best practice. Again, it will depend on the format of your recording - sometimes during an informal type recording, being seen referring back to your notes is not necessarily a bad thing.

The software used for screencasting in the Microstudio is called OBS Studio. OBS has the ability to overlay different video and audio sources in real time (eg screen + webcam) - the options are virtually limitless but a series of presets have been created to simplify the process of recording your screencast. These presets are called scenes. The default scenes that have been set up are as follow:

• Webcam only (full screen)
• Screen only (full screen)
• Blank
• Screen (full screen) + webcam (small, moved to one of the corners)

During recording, you can easily switch across the different scenes using the Stream Deck. Switching across different screens can be useful if you want to emphasize different parts of your screen (eg at the conclusion of the screencast, you may want to have the webcam as a full screen instead of a static desktop screen).

Planning these switches during the scripting part can help inform your script, can save a lot of time during the recording part and can make it look more professional (compared to a video that randomly switches between scenes or that remains static).