You might still wonder what the practical benefits of screencasting are and where it can be used. The quick answer is that only your imagination is the limit for the uses of screencasting. The paragraphs above implied one of the many possible uses of screencasting – to create demo movies to answer frequent support issues. This is hardly the only possible use of screencasting – since screencasting combines both picture and audio to show what is happening on screen, it is an extremely useful medium to communicate knowledge and ideas and can be used for demonstration of software features, for all kinds of e-learning, for HOWTOs for a particular program or task, for reporting bugs in software, etc.
The fact that screencasting is gaining popularity is hardly surprising. What is more, neither screencasting, nor the technologies it employs are new – there has been screencasting software (Lotus ScreenCam) for more than a decade, not to mention the existence of audio and screen capture techniques that have existed for more than twenty or thirty years. But one of the reasons why screencasting became so popular recently is the fact that due to their size (5, 10, 50 MB or more) screencasts could not distributed easily before broadband Internet became common all around the globe.
Although I know from the start that any attempt to take a complete list of the possible uses of screencasting without skipping an important use is bound to fail, I will show you just some of the most common uses of screencasting. I would like to point to another classification – not that much of screencasting uses but of screencasting genres – made by Jon Udell, who is one of the emblematic names of screencasting. So, according to their purpose, screencasts can be divided as follows:
- Commercial Demos – I am not sure if this is the first or the most common use of screencasts but certainly it is a major use and one of the reasons why screencasting became so popular. Commercial demos are intended to show to the target audience what a marvel a given piece of software or a site is. I bet that this is the most expensive type of screencasts because when it is part of the sales and marketing campaign of a given company, the quality of the pictures has to be outstanding and very often the audio narration is recorded in a studio by professional actors, rather by the user himself.
- Tutorials and HOWTOs – tutorials and HOWTOs are an essential use of screencasting – it looks that screencasting is invented just to make it possible to show in a couple of actions rather than in paragraphs of text how to perform a given task. And the possibility to add audio narration to explain exactly what is happening on screen makes it the perfect tool when you have to repeat a given lecture or a course many times, addressing audiences of hundreds and thousands of people. It is obvious that for e-learning and distance learning screencasting is a really valuable technology.
- Instructional Movies – while tutorials and HOWTOs are generally short (from 5 minutes to half an hour) and concentrate on a particular task only, technology does not limit the size of a screencasts and it could be a full-length movie. But there are some specifics of long screencasts – they must be made into logical smaller parts, otherwise the audience will hardly have the patience to see it at once from start to end. The advantage of full-length instructional movies over tutorials is that in the movie you can include everything in a logical sequence, while the tutorials (even if your number them as Part 1, Part 2, etc.) generally examine only one topic.
- Software Reviews – I don’t think that anybody will dispute the advantage of a screencast over a textual description only, when reviews are concerned. It is so much easy to communicate an idea, when you can show the stuff you are reviewing.
- Reporting Bugs – although this stuff is not abundant on the Net, screencasting to record and report bugs is a really valuable tool. As my experience shows, bugs are tricky in two aspects – there are bugs that occur only occasionally and under specific circumstances and therefore are not always easy to reproduce and sometimes, even the bug is reproducable but it is hard to fix, developers just find it easier to deny its existence than to fix it. But when one can present a movie with exactly what is happening, then it is visible what is wrong and if there is a will, there is a way to fix it.