Ask YC: Recommendations on how to make demo video (60 sec tour) for our starup? | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: Recommendations on how to make demo video (60 sec tour) for our starup?

12 pointsshafqat16 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?

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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.

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

http://www.commoncraft.com/

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

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.

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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