25. 02. 2026 Charles Callaway Documentation

Making Your Own Video Tutorials, Part 20: Recording a Good Task-based Screencast

Welcome to part 20 in our series on creating effective tutorial-style videos on a budget.

Today: Screencasts! Let’s start off with just our basic assumptions:

We want to show people how to navigate around the GUI of a particular piece of software, and what its functionality is by actually interacting with the buttons and text fields needed to complete tasks with that software
We want to make a series of short screencasts, each of which will be part of a larger, more complex video
Screencasts that take up the full screen so we can see even small details, and are captured directly from the operating system, not a video camera in front of a computer monitor recording it
We want short and succinct interactions – not the informal style where there’s voiceover with lots of context and elaborations – just the minimal interactions necessary for a task sequence

There’s nothing wrong with the informal style, but it takes experience and skill to pull off well, while the style presented here can be done even by beginners, because it shifts the “performance” away from the video subject into the video editing task, which you can undertake piecemeal and without the pressure.

If you’ve ever seen the difference between a 3 minute tutorial video and a 30 minute all-hands teleconference that cover the exact same content despite the difference in their length, and thought “I’d rather watch the 3 minute video”, this article is for you.

Tools for Creating Screencasts

The raw material for our screencasts is recording a full-screen video, often in MP4 format. Every operating system, for desktop or mobile, lets you do this for free. This often just gives you the most basic type of recording possible, perhaps only with system audio.

You can get more full-featured screencast software, often open source like the well-known OBS Studio. Just search for “screencast software download”, or even “top 10 screencast recorder reviews”.

Since I already use ActivePresenter for video editing, I also use it for screencast recording. It has extra features like including synchronized webcam layovers and separate mouse movement recording, and it makes importing a screencast into your project as easy as it could possibly be.

If you use a different video editor, check if it doesn’t also offer similar advantages.

Preparing for Recording

Our goal here is minimalism: record just the full screen interaction where you click and type, and nothing else. Think of the voiceover that would accompany it as a completely separate thing.

To get there, create a written action script that describes the starting state of the GUI and the sequence of actions (mouse, keyboard, etc.) to run through. If you have a multi-screen setup, you can put the script on a second monitor, otherwise print it out. You’ll want to follow through the script line-by-line, and end the recording as soon as you’re done.

The action script is not the same as the voice script. You want to think of each medium as being a completely different entity that goes separately into your video editor (with the one exception of live video of a person, which requires maintaining synchronization between the video and audio channels).

Unless you’re making an extremely short video, you’ll probably need a number of these scripts, one for each independent segment in your video. If you use a scene-based video editor, that works out to one screencast per screen.

And if the segments need to flow from one to the other, you’ll probably want to make sure the GUI looks the same between each sequential segment to keep the viewer from getting confused. Even the mouse position should be the same at the start of the next screencast.

Before you start recording, make sure the environment is clean: no extra icons, windows, panels, or popups. If you’re using a browser, don’t have extra tabs visible (create a new window just for that tab), hide your toolbars (CTRL-SHIFT-B in Firefox!), and consider using private mode. Try to ensure there will be no pop-ups or notifications that will hide parts of your application.

Finally, practice your action script a few times to make sure it’s fluid. Every mistake or delay you make while recording is something you’ll have to edit out later, which means you’ll be slower. Multiply that out by a large number of segments, and you’ll be losing hours of time when you can easily avoid it.

Don’t Record with Audio

Recording audio at the same time is actually counterproductive. You’ll have to separate them out or edit them later in the video editor anyway, and it often distracts you or slows you down because you’re multitasking. As far as your video editor is concerned, at a basic level one media element is treated just like any other editing element.

Think of it as making B-Roll video. When you do that, you don’t record a voiceover: at most you’re recording natural ambient noise. Inside your video project, you’ll treat your screencasts exactly as you would your B-Roll.

An important reason for doing this is because of how the iterative editing process works. As you improve your video, you may rewrite the text more than once, so your recorded voiceover will be different over time, and you’ll end up wasting a lot of time if you have to keep synchronizing them. Again like B-Roll, the recorded screencasts themselves tend to be edited less frequently, and mainly for a bit of synchronization.

And for the final version, you’ll want any voiceovers to have the exact same “quality”, by which I mean your volume is the same, any background noise or echo is the same, and your voice aspect is the same. You don’t want to record one day with a slightly stuffy nose and then the next day without.

Editing Your Screencast in Your Video Editor

You’ll always have to do some editing of the screencast because the timing of individual interactions have to match the points at which they’re mentioned in the audio recording.

Sometimes you’ll also want to edit out small mistakes rather than re-record the screencast, especially if you only notice the mistake at a later time. But also remember that good preparation means you’ll make fewer mistakes in the first place.

By following the minimalism rule, you’ll ensure the only reason to edit is to synchronize the screencast with successive iterations of the voiceover. This basically just means:

Cutting and Slowing down the screencast when the audio is faster
Speeding up and Inserting a pause when the audio is slower than the screencast

You don’t want the mouse to be moving around much during the pauses between interactions, so keep mouse movement to a minimum, too. One of the problems with changing the speed is the mouse and the cursor caret will move or blink faster than normal, so keep mouse movements to a minimum in the screencast and be sure to synchronize your edits to any GUI elements that repeat regularly.

Typically what will happen is you tell the user to do something like move the mouse around while that’s happening onscreen, and then you pause the screencast whenever you want to explain something that doesn’t involve interaction. You don’t want any distractions while you explain things.

Privacy and Anonymization

Your first desire when creating a screencast is to probably show off your software to its full potential. But that typically means it needs to be populated with lots of data, for instance to show how filtering works.

Unfortunately, you almost always can’t just record whatever data is already there and show it to the world on YouTube. It may contain sensitive customer or company information that could get you and your company in trouble.

There are two main approaches to resolving this problem. First, your video editor likely supports blurring out sections of the video, either as a rectangle or some other common shape.

There are two main problems though: movement and quantity. If the data is scrolling on a panel, for instance, that blurring shape has to move along with the data, or else it will become visible even for just a brief moment. Or you’ll blur out something else that you want to be showing. And if you have lots of data in many places, you’ll have to add lots of blurring shapes to cover them all. Don’t get me started on lots of data moving in different directions….

The blurring approach can take a lot of time, especially as the amount of movement increases, the number of areas to blur increases, and your video gets longer. Except in the simplest of cases, blurring probably won’t be the best solution.

Instead, set things up so you don’t have to blur in the first place. One way is to create a complete, fake demo environment, optimally one that you can reuse many times with future videos, since it’s time consuming to fabricate a large quantity of data.

Sometimes with important applications a demo environment may already be available. But if not, you’ll be on your own. Which isn’t so bad; for example you can use data values that make people laugh to liven up your video.

Modern desktop apps tend to be in web apps running in browsers, and one trick I’ve learned is that if it’s a page that you won’t have to record often or that doesn’t have a ton of data, you can just go into the browser’s Inspect mode and change what you see on that page. But if the page has autorefresh, disable it if you don’t want to see your changes wiped out before you can finish entering them.

Finally, data isn’t the only thing that needs to be scrubbed. You may also have to worry about 3rd party logos, and URLs either in the browser’s URL field or along the bottom of the browser window if dynamic or hovered URLs are displayed there.

Wrapping Up

Before we close out, here are a few more tips when recording your screencast:

Check that your screen resolution/size matches what you need in your video project and what size you’re actually recording at.
As with all video editing, doing things as an assembly line tech makes everything faster, so write out your action scripts beforehand for the entire video and record them all at the same time.
Leave your mouse in a fixed spot between script elements. Don’t move the mouse too quickly, or it will really jump around a lot when you speed up the screencast in your editor.
On the other hand, type as quickly as you can, perhaps even cut & paste instead. Typing is really slow and always has to be sped up in the editor.
Whenever possible, cut blinking cursors in a screencast rather than speeding them up while editing.
Don’t move or resize windows or panels unless absolutely necessary. Remember that minimalism is the key, and movement is your enemy.

I’m confident that with a bit of practice, you’ll quickly get the hang of efficiently and cheaply creating screencasts. There’s no rocket science here, it’s just getting to know what works and practicing it. Have fun!