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Ask YC: Recommendations on how to make demo video (60 sec tour) for our starup?
12 points by shafqat on March 10, 2008 | hide | past | favorite | 16 comments
Are there any (free) products on the web that help make demo videos? We want to make a 60 second tour for our startup, and were wondering if people had any good recomendations. Just need to show the screen and capture mouse movements/changes with some voiceover or text.

Any ideas?



Free, open-source screen capture program for Windows:

http://camstudio.org/

I've used a suspiciously similar-looking program called DemoStudio in the past and I found it fairly easy to use.


Camtasia is easy to use. http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp


I have used it before, and Camtasia is really good. It exports video in a bunch of formats (flash is one of them) plus it has a 30 days no limitation trial.


ishowu for the mac is pretty cheap. i am afraid there aren't too many free options that are easy to use. there is http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/vnc2swf/ i've used it before, but honestly spending a few bucks in this department will save you time in the long haul.

there was some sort of hack with using yui as a guided tour a few weeks back, sorry no link. applying a voiceover could be a problem though.


i heard there is an inbuilt product for the mac that does this. you said ishowu is 'pretty cheap', so I imagine that isnt it? thanks for everyone's help!


$30.


Why don't you watch the peepcode screencast, it's only 9 bucks but very worth it.

He explains how to use iMovie, iShowU and Omnigraffle for creating them.

The link is https://peepcode.com/products/screencasting-on-the-mac

(BTW I don't know or am affiliated with the top funky guy, just a fan of their peepcode screencasts)


Yes - I suggest showing if it makes sense - how it affects a user when using it. This will garner you a larger audience, then step 1, step 2, etc

Like Speeddate's (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJnXORCW1Vg)vid.

This is something we did for our startup and it has worked well!


Get a good mike. Might be the most important thing you do to create a good vid.


http://amazon.decenturl.com/samson-audio-c01u-condenser is the kind of thing you'll be wanting


I've heard good things about that one, but ended up with a Blue Snowball which also works well. Love using with with skype and speakers for a truly hands and headset free talking experience.


I use a $40 Logitech headset, Screenography for OSX, and iMovie.


I know that VMWare workstation has a "capture movie" setting. It's pretty handy to be able to have the functionality outside of the OS, so you can use any OS you want.


While you're asking about tools, I gotta link to these guys:

http://www.commoncraft.com/

They do some pretty kickass "screencasts". ;-)


www.jing.com

Its free, not the best but super super easy to use. You can make up to a 5 min video, while talking people through it.


email ijustine :)




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