A BRIEF GUIDE TO CREATING VIDEO PRODUCT DEMOS
CONTENTS
Section 1: screen recording without post editing. .............................................................................. 1
Section 2: Screen recording with post editing. ..................................................................................... 3
SECTION 1: SCREEN RECORDING WITHOUT POST EDITING.
In this tutorial, we use the free CamStudio software. You can use any other
software, as long as it produces YouTube compatible videos.
Installation:
First, download and install CamStudio from
http://camstudio.en.softonic.com/. Running it will give you a screen similar to
the below.
Some things to do before you start recording:

Click ‘Options -> Video Options’ to reach the following dialog box. While it
is OK to use default configurations, we think the configuration given in the
dialog below will give you a better result.

Keyboard shortcuts can help too. For example, using them allows you to
minimize CamStudio before you start recording. Go to ‘options 
keyboard shortcuts’ and configure/memorize the keys to start/pause
recording and to stop recording. Given below is an example.

Next, click the ‘region’ menu and choose which region you want to record.
If you do not need to record the full screen, choosing the ‘region’ option
will allow you to select only part of the screen for recording.
Recording:
Now, minimize CamStudio and press the shortcut key to start recording. If you chose to
record only a region, the software will now allow you to draw a rectangle to mark the
area you want to record.
You can also use the same shortcut key to pause and resume recording. After you have
recorded all the important features of your product, you can stop the recording using
the corresponding shortcut key.
More help:
You can learn some basic operations by clicking Help->help in menu bar. The
video below can teach you more about CamStudio usage.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kiug3H3c4gk.
SECTION 2: SCREEN RECORDING WITH POST EDITING.
If you want to improve the recorded video by doing some of the below, you
can use Screen2exe software and CamStudio software in combination:
1) Cut useless parts in your video.
2) Add notes or annotations.
3) Add images within video.
4) Zoom in/out within video.
In essence, we are going to record the demo and edit it using Screen2exe since it
has better video editing capabilities than CamStudio. But the video produced by
Screen2exe is in exe format. Once editing is done, we convert the video to a
YouTube compatible format using CamStudio. Again, you may use other tools as
long as the video produced is compatible with YouTube.
Installation:
Download the following software and install on your machine.


Screen2Exe: http://screen2exe.en.softonic.com/.
CamStudio: http://camstudio.en.softonic.com/.
Recording the video:
Screen2Exe is intuitive to use, but since it has more features than CamStudio, it
will take some fiddling around before you get the hang of it. The following short
video teaches you how to use it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFTFEbtVnVU.
Note that Screen2Exe gives you 5 seconds to prepare the desktop between the time you
press the ‘start recording’ button and the time it actually starts recording.
Shortcut keys: F9 to pause/resume, F10 to stop.
Editing can be done after recording has finished.
Converting from exe to YouTube compatible format:
After you are done with the editing and have the demo in exe format, simply play
the exe file produced by Screen2exe and capture the playback area using
CamStudio (Usage of CamStudio is explained in Section 1 of this document).
Prepared by: Xu Yan (past tutor)