Screencasting Best Practices

First, I was fortunate to not have any problems using Jing. Since I don’t fix anything that’s not broken, this blog post applies to my experiences using Jing only. Here's 2 things that have worked for me:

Plan and Practice…With screencasting, I usually find myself recording something more than once. I’ve found it’s helpful for me to write down an outline of what I’m going to say. I wouldn’t say write down everything verbatim like a speech – although that may in fact prevent me from saying um so many times in one screencast – but definitely do a little planning before you hit record.

Keep it short and simple…I’ve found recording in 800x600 or 640x480 like Steve suggests works well. In the past when I’ve tried to record a larger window Jing sometimes gets “stuck” on me. Also, when I’ve recorded something really long Jing sometimes gets stuck transferring the file to screencast.com. I’ve found keeping my screencasts short and to the point has worked best for recording and uploading.