olivierlacan/gary_bernhardt_screencasting_parley.md

## gary_bernhardt_screencasting_parley.md

      
    Raw
  

              gary_bernhardt_screencasting_parley.md
            
          
    I'm planning on either writing this up in detail or maybe doing a
screencast about screencasting, but I'll give a short version here.
On sound quality:
This matters a lot. In decreasing order of importance:


Remove echo. You have to hear this to understand. Set up a mic in
front of your mouth and record a sentence. Then, put a thick comforter
over you and the mic and say it again at the same distance. Listen to
the two using headphones; you'll understand. Google for solutions.


Remove noise. Disable the HVAC and flip the breaker for your
fridge. Lawn mowers and car horns are harder to deal with.


Get a decent mic. I use a Rode Podcaster ($230) on a boom arm
(about $70 for one that clamps to your desk). I got it because of Dan
Benjamin's guide, linked in this thread.


Remove vibration. Before I used a professional studio, I'd put a
folded dish towel between my keyboard and the desk. Otherwise, your
typing vibrations go through the desk, up the clamped-on boom arm,
through the shock mount (!), and into the mic.


If you're not using a pro studio, your best bet is a walk-in closet
with no external walls. The clothes along the walls will dampen
echoes; the lack of external walls will insulate you from outside
noise. Nowadays, I have a deal with a studio where I rent time without
an engineer for $25 an hour. I'm normally there when a producer is
using the control room anyway, so it's a pure win for them.
On speaking quality:
You want the mic close to your mouth. In recent Destroy All Software
screencasts, the mic is about four inches from my mouth, angled about
15 degrees up, and 45 degrees to the right of my mouth. Putting it to
the side isn't optimal, but I have to be able to see my laptop screen
since I record live.
Controlling your mouth properly also matters, but I don't really have
anything useful to say there. I haven't consciously focused on this,
although I've definitely gotten better. I still really mess up an S
sometimes. Fortunately, Ps aren't a problem since my mic is 45 degrees
off-axis.
Standing is significantly better than sitting. Nowadays I sit because
my studio doesn't have a standing desk. It's a concession I made to
stop having takes ruined by lawn mowers, leaf blowers, and ambulances.
On video quality:
This one's pretty easy. Record at the resolution you'll publish at. I
use 1440x900 with a 14pt font. Better too many pixels than too few. I
export with h.264, "best" quality, multi-pass. These are the maximum
settings possible. My exports tend to be about 60-100 MB for a 10-15
minute screencast.
I've tried very hard to never alter the appearance of a DAS
screencast. It's the same color scheme, font, font size, resolution,
etc. as on the day I started.
On flow:
DAS screencasts are recorded live. I don't know how to do this in any
other way (I haven't tried). Everyone tells me that they can't record
live; I'm skeptical that this is true. It was hard at first and I'd
need 12 takes to get a decent result. Now, my second take is usually
pretty reasonable (though the one that's published is usually around 6
or 8).
In every DAS screencast, you're seeing my actual thoughts, as they
occurred. I don't make an outline and rearrange thing. My first step
is to sit down and hack around for 15-30 minutes, figuring out what
I'll demonstrate. Then I revert, go back at the beginning, and do it
again while explaining what I'm doing. After a few iterations of that,
I start recording. But even in the final screencast that flows nicely,
you're still seeing my thoughts in the order they originally occurred,
and I'm still ad-libbing the entire thing. I've just done it enough
times that I don't have to think about what comes next.
In any case, if you're saying "uhh" or "umm" or backtracking or saying
long sentences, it's not ready and you should practice more.
Examples:


das-comparison.mp3, attached. This is a small clip of DAS #1 and
DAS #84 (the second-most-recent one). In #1 the mic was a couple feet
from my mouth and I was standing at my breakfast bar, facing into the
kitchen (pretty much the most terrible, reflective thing to face). In
#84 I'm in my current professional studio.


home-vs-studio.mp3, attached. This is me saying the same sentence
with the same hardware, the same mic positioning, and the same voice
(my "I'm-trying-to-record-a-final-take" voice). The only difference is
where I'm recording. The first clip is in the last iteration of my
home studio. There's a lot of foam on the walls and a thick sheet
separating the recording nook from the hallway, so there are fewer
reflections than you'll get in most untreated rooms. This is more
effort than most people put into a podcasting/screencasting home
studio, I think. The second clip is in a professional studio. It's
night-and-day even compared to my best efforts at home.


I guess that wasn't so short. :/
http://link.olivierlacan.com/PLoq
http://link.olivierlacan.com/PKKb
Oh, I forgot to mention: in das-comparison.mp3, you hear mistakes in
both clips; I chose those intentionally. The mistake from DAS #1 is an
error of flow: my mind blanked for a second and couldn't keep up with
the pace of the screencast, so there's a pause. This is what happens
when you haven't practiced enough (or just aren't good enough at live
performance, as was the case for me back then). When this stops
happening, or at least mostly stops, it's a good indication that a
screencast is ready.
In the clip from #84, I stumble over the words "on the left". (It
actually sounds like an edit to me, which is weird; it's not.) I allow
small numbers of these mistakes to exist in my final screencasts. This
is partly because it would be a lot of work to ship without any little
mistakes at all, but also partly because they betray the reality of
the recording: it really is me sitting there, talking to you live, and
I like for it to feel that way.
OK, now I'm done. ;)
On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 5:17 PM, James Gray ja...@graysoftinc.com wrote:

I really don't mean this to be insulting and I definitely appreciate the
effort you put into your craft, but can you clarify how it matters?  I don't
consciously know of anytime I've ever had thoughts about the sound quality
with regard to screencasts.  Did you see better feedback or increased
submissions or anything as you improved your sound quality over time?

Well, let me deconstruct my statement because there's a lot of context
wrapped up in it.


Quality matters to me, personally. I care about the quality of the
work that I do. I don't think that a human can say "I am going to
obsess over content quality but not care about delivery quality".
These things, and our perception of them, are deeply entangled. When I
say that audio quality matters, I'm expressing this belief about
humans (which I clearly think is a well-justified belief).


DAS has density as a goal, and even as a motivation for existing. To
give a simplified history: when DAS started in early 2011, there was
PeepCode, which was presentation-style, and there were lots of one-off
amateur screencasts (including mine) that were slow and full of
mistakes. I wanted to show that a screencast could be a live
demonstration of actual programming but still be dense and engaging.
Audio quality is relevant to this because you have to be able to
understand me as a speak quickly and make mistakes, which are
unavoidable in a live screencast. The relatively minor difference
between my home studio and the professional studio probably doesn't
matter here, but I think that the difference between DAS #1 and DAS
#84 does matter. The clarity difference there is huge. There are going
to be slurred words in a screencast that some viewers will understand
with the higher-quality audio, but not the lower-quality.


A lot of people have commented on the quality of DAS screencasts.
They don't usually mention audio quality specifically, but they're
also not going to be experts in that. Humans encountering an artifact
can't dispassionately evaluate different parts of it; that's not how
our brains work. A story: I just bought a Pioneer SX-780 receiver
manufactured in the late 70s. I love it not just because of the sound
it makes, but because it's of such high quality. You could dump it in
a bath tub or throw it down the stairs and it would probably be fine.
It weighs enough that I can barely get it out of the back seat of a
car. You can just look at the thing and say "that is an object of high
quality". I can't add weight and physical ruggedness to my
screencasts, but I've added whatever I think I can, which mostly means
audio quality, video quality, and clarity of speech.


I don't want to go all Robert Pirsig on you, but there's clearly a
recurring theme here: we can't disentangle the quality of individual
components of an object. A receiver that sounds great and survives a
bath tub will be perceived as higher quality; the same words spoken in
a screencast with higher quality audio will be perceived as higher
quality. I want the experience of watching my screencasts to be of the
highest quality that I can achieve. I think that there are business
gains there up to a certain point, but I've also gone beyond that
point because my goal isn't just to make money; it's to make the best
thing that I can make: quality for its own sake.
That may be way more than you bargained for. ;)