How to make a screencast video the easy way

Making video doesn’t have to be hard! And just to prove that, I’m going to show you how to make a screencast video – you don’t even need a camera.

I made this video with tools you can use for free, although the video will be much better if you pay $15 for a year’s access to Screencast-O-Matic, because this will remove the logo on your video. $15 a year a steal for the features you get with Screencast-O-Matic, too.

Right, let’s start with the video:

The idea behind it was for it was for me to show people how you can turn a blog post into a video. To make it more interesting I used someone else’s blog post (this one by Claire Godwin, with the author’s permission of course!) I liked the image in the post and decided to run with that, which would give me an effect that looks a little like a chalkboard.

I used the content in Claire’s blog post to put together a Google Slides presentation, which is a  lot like PowerPoint but free. Click here for the PDF of my slides.

I added animations so that dotted lines, arrows etc popped up as I clicked my mouse. To do this, log on to Google (logging into your Gmail account will be fine) go to Google docs and create a Google slides presentation. Add some text or an image to your slide, click on it to select it, then go to the Insert menu and Animation. An animation pane will appear on the right of the screen and you can choose your animation effect from there. In this pane you can select animation for the object you’ve selected or the slide transition (e.g. you can set the slide to flip or fade into the next if you want to).

Then I went into Present mode (‘present’ button, top right of Google slides screen) and practiced talking through the presentation without recording. I usually write a script, but because this is such a short video and I was very familiar with the content – I’d only just put the slides together from the blog post-  I didn’t really need it this time.

Tip: I used the right arrow button to move the slides and animations on as it’s quieter than clicking the mouse.

Then I opened up Screencast-O-Matic, set up my mic and went through the presentation again, this time recording my narrations and screen.

For a video this short it’s probably easiest to record it in one take, but you could also drop it into a free video editor like iMovie or Movie Maker if you do want to trim any part of it out.

For my PLR videos I use a similar process to this, but I use Camtasia and PowerPoint which gives me some extra features and a more professional finish. But for getting started with making screencast videos I found Screencast-O-Matic and Google Slides was a good combination.

So I hope now you can see how easy it is to make a screencast video!

Alternatively, if you’d prefer to buy your videos ready-made, take a look at my PLR video store here.