Producing 'How-to' videos for Marketo Users?

Hey David,

This is a great idea, particularly when you work with large teams. I've done it before and I tended to use Camtasia Studio for recording screens and audio as well as editing. It's not the best software out there for video editing, but given that all I needed to do was record slides, marketo screens, and a voice over and then splice them all together - It was up to the job and costed a fairly small amount.

I learnt a lot from the first few attempts I had at doing it, maybe you'll be able to spare yourself a bit of heartache by hearing the lessons

1. Make sure that use use Powerpoint for section headers or points where you want to stop and discuss theory - Having you talking over a marketo screen tends to leave your audience focused more on "what's he going to click next" and less on "what's he going to say"
2. Have a script - Adlibbing when you record is much harder than you'd think, even when you've got a really good understanding of the subject matter... It turns out we can't all do improv after all
3. Record the screen caps and audio separately - Recording and doing the voice-over together is kind of like trying to pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time... Except with the extra obstacle of server lag occasionally meaning that you have to wait for your stomach to load! Get the footage you want before you start working on your audio explanations and you'll save your audience having to hear your constant "Haha, and now we just wait for marketo to load... ummmm... ummm... soooo.... this is... yup"
4. Edit first, dub later - When you get to editing and finalizing these videos, you'll want to go in and edit a lot of the load screens, moving from one tab to another, and the misclicks out... and maybe speed the framerate up to about 1.5x. If you record your sound before you do this, you'll find that your audio track quickly falls out of sync with your video track - and you get to start all over again. If you start by getting the video to where you want it to be, and you have a script, you'll be able to time your script, know exactly how much footage you need, and get those 2 things perfectly synced with the least amount of rewrites.
5. Put aside a lot more time than you think - When I first embarked on this adventure I had a great friend of mine who was a video content pro tell me that it'd take a long time... In my confidence I thought "It can't be that hard, I know my subject matter inside and out and back to front... 1 take every time". At the end of the first day of recording, I had MAYBE 3 minute of usable footage (because I made all of the mistakes I warned you about at once)... After that I realized that I'd better ask for some advice, and my friend outlined the basic principles I'm now sharing with you... Even after I implemented her methodology I was still only producing about 20-30 minutes of production quality recordings in an 8 hour day.

I hope this advice has been helpful, and be sure to let us know how it goes

Guy

I do this with GTM as well. Fast and easy.