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Making a ShowMeDo

First and foremost - making a screencast video is easy. Mostly it is free (there is a small exception for the Mac) and you can pick-up the skills within an hour of starting. You can see a great thread in our forums where many of our authors explain how and why they made their own videos - 'How we make ShowMeDos'.

You'll need to have an idea about what you'll present, and you'll need to figure out which platform to use. Windows is great (it has free software that we're experienced with), Mac is pretty good (paid-for but cheap software which some of our authors have used). Linux is tricky - you'll need to do some keyboard judo, we'll try to help but we have very limited experience on Linux.

Remember to read our requirements page, we'll have a much better chance of being able to accept your videos if they are in a format that we can deal with.

Transcoding is a bit of a black-art, many packages aren't compatible between different formats and we want to keep everything at a high quality, so we have carefully chosen the few formats that we know we can work with. If you can't use these formats, do get in touch and we'll see what we can work out.

What to present

When you know what to present, plan a rough script for the videos. If your material exceeds about 10 mintues worth of presentation (just read it aloud to yourself, slowly and clearly, and time it) then you need to split the script into separate videos. Users like to have chunks of information to watch, one super-long video containing lots of info can just become overwhelming.

Having planned your video(s) for 5-15 minutes in length (6 minutes makes for a great length), get in touch and we can talk about your plans. We have experience with 59 ShowMeDos so far (as I write this), so we know a few things now about making great videos.

How to present

Remember our acceptance requirements - your video will need to look good at 800x600 (the size of our forthcoming player page). If you can record at 800x600 then all the better as you won't get any scaling artifacts.

Try a few dry-runs with the screencasting software, note things like whether you talk slowly and clearly enough, whether your mouse gets in the way of the point you're making, whether you type well...A couple of practice runs should let you know how the final thing will turn out.

Now - don't panic! If you know what you're talking about, you will very likely find that anything you produce will be educational to someone who knows less than you...and that's the whole point of the exercise. It doesn't matter if you 'umm' and 'err', if you mis-type, if you forget what you're saying...what matters is that you get your points across slowly and confidently.

Several of our authors have expressed quite reasonable fears before they started, yet they've all gone on to make great videos - you can too :-)

Sending us the video

Visit our Submissions Form and send us a message telling us what you have made (or want to make). We can give you advice and help if you need it. Remember that most SWF videos are not acceptable!

Once you have made the video you'll need to compress it, as it will be very large, and then send it to us. For compression we recommend 7-Zip (it makes smaller files than older Zip programs like WinZip). We have an online FTP account that you can use to send us the files (just ask for a login), or you can send us URLs if you have your own storage space.

ShowMeDo Background Logos

We have several logos that you can use as a background image or a watermark - see ShowMeDo Logo Images.

Guidelines for a Programming Video

Steven Devijver has created a page with some guidelines for how to make videos about programming languages. Feel free to extend these ideas so that new authors can get a better idea about what to present.

The recording

Each video needs to be reasonably self-contained, so you should introduce yourself and a quick summary of the material every time. We're building a name for ourselves as hosting only high-quality educational content, so feel free to refer to 'ShowMeDo' in the video...if your video goes further than our site then users will know where to come to find more of your (and similar) videos.

The first video in a series

Start with something like "Hi, my name is Bob Smith and in this ShowMeDo series I'm going to talk about Getting Started with Python programming, in this video I'll cover running Python for the first time.".

After the introduction you'd go on to cover the meat of the episode, then wrap up with something like "I've now finished this entry in the series, here I covered running Python for the first time, in the next video I'll be covering Variables and the Print statement - thanks for watching!".

Second and subsequent videos

Continuing from the above, you might start with "Hi, Bob Smith again in this second video in my Getting Started with Python series, last time I covered running Python for the first time and in this video I'll cover Variables and the Print statment."

Experiment with a style

The above suggestions are just that - suggestions. We're not looking to enforce a regimented style, indeed see ShareCore and David Rawlinson's videos for examples of using a different format (these are real-world videos, not screencasts, but the presentation style is what matters).

Editing

See Video_editing for some notes on video editing tools - you can do things like record a video in parts and then join them together in just a couple of minutes, or edit out bad audio or video. Basic editing is pretty straightforward for small videos.

What to do next?

Get in contact so you can submit the video! You'll need to provide 1-4 paragraphs of description text, and if these videos are the start of a new series then we'll need a piece of text describing the series too. That's it! Contact me (ian@showmedo.com) and we'll arrange to receive the files, then we'll post them on the site.

License

We're assuming that all videos follow a Creative Commons license, but we haven't specified this on the site yet. Our default license is Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareALike. The author of a video is free to specify their own license, preferably under the CC scheme.

The ownership of the videos remains with you and you are free to ask us to take down or replace the videos at any time.

Making a ShowMeDo video