Need to create a professional Demo / Video Tutorial for my Software Application

I am creating a desktop application and i'll need a video tutorial / demo for the app, to put on my company website.

The purpose of the video is to obviously explain how to use the program, but to also sell around the product by highlighting the benefits.

The video should be about 2-3mins long.

I've never created this sort of thing before and would prefer to outsource it. Can anyone recommend a good resource / site to use? Any idea on price?

Because of my tight budget Ive considered doing it myself with some good screencast software. However as I know this video could be a great selling tool, I'm looking into professional companies / freelancers.

There are any number of screen recording programs you can use to capture the usage of the software (see the above posts for several links and hit Google for more). The trick with this sort of thing is to have the right narrator.

I've created at least two presentations like this and I simply copied the ones I've seen on other sites that appealed to me. This lead me to the following sequence (which seemed to work well):

1/ The voice over must be aimed at the target audience. So write a script that covers all the points you want to cover, grab someone who would be a typical user of your product and let them point out what they don't understand or is not important to them (the power users who want the more advanced features will go to your FAQ anyway). Adjust and trim your script appropriately.

2/ Find someone with a calm and friendly voice (preferably female) to do the voice over for you. I know that sounds sexist but most people (males and females) respond better to a calm female voice than to a male voice (Why do you think that is the default voice for most GPS units). You really need to record people reading from a script and then listen to the recordings rather than base it off a natural voice - there can be major differences.

3/ Run through the demonstration with you controlling the software and the narrator reading in the background. You need to figure out where pauses are required so the software can catch up or you need to wait for the explanation to finish before moving to the next feature. Non-verbal cues are good here - a flat palm to indicate a pause, thumbs up to indicate a continuation and simply waiting for speech to finish before moving to the next feature. Run through this at least twice and you should be ready to record for real.

4/ Do the final version in a noise free environment. After hours if this is for a corporate job or very early in the morning on a weekday if it's for your own project. You can get very good quality without a sound proofed room.

5/ You need to capture the screen as well as record the audio (see above for tools). Merging and synching the two can be done with tools available by default with a modern OS (iMovie or Windows Movie Editor) and posting it online is almost automatic (send to YouTube and embed the video in your site - hosting and bandwidth of the video is no longer your problem).

I hope this helps. Outsourcing this for a product demonstration seems pointless, costly and time consuming when you can do it yourself in 2 or 3 days and see the results immediately.

Ian Ozsvald is the man behind ProCasts and author of The Screencasting Handbook. He has price estimates and several demos of past work on his site.

I know you're wanting to outsource this but I've had some luck making my own demo's in Wink. Works well and is easy to pickup. Oh, it's free too!

Try Camtasia, (screencast software) you can get a free trial and the software is top-notch!

One thing I should point out is to avoid getting bogged down in the technical details and remember the SELLING details.

Try the basic AIDA and you'll be streets ahead of most such videos:

Attention
Interest
Desire
and importantly, Action - tell them to download or buy the thing!

If you're paying out for freelance work don't be surprised to find the copywriter charging around twice (or more) the cost of the video creation/editing side.

AC

1. Plan a script
2. Go to voices.com and find a voice talent to turn your script to audio
3. Record screen and edit the video according to the audio

Key points:

1. Script and audio first, video second, because it's easier to make change to video, but hard to edit audio without introduce 'jump'
2. Don't do audio yourself, believe me, you can't do it well.
3. Do video yourself, nobody can do it better than you.

Personally I would use a professional like http://demogirl.com/. I have used them in the past, she creates a great super professional screencast of your application for $199. In my case I hadnt much time to spend on it and she created the entire script and cvideo pretty much on her own

You can use videohive You can use this website to buy prebuilt video templates.
You will basically gat project files (for after effect for example) with fully developed video and what you have to do is just to update the textual and image placeholders with your own content.

See this complete demo video. It provide you with an overview of the video and how to edit it.

Try Sophie. It is a free authoring tool. Note that I have not used it and cannot speak for its efficacy.