Do you use audio in your short tutorials?

[schultza]

My company is just starting to investigate creating short tutorials using Mimic, which we can make available on our Client Web site to help demonstrate common uses of our software.

Because we only have one recording room if we want to record audio, and because having audio increases the production time (need a script, more room for error), we are strongly considering having only visual recordings.

Anyone have experience with doing this, or recommendations for/against adding audio?

[SteveS]

My concern with audio has always been 'can I guarantee the user has speakers connected and sound turned on?'

When I was using Mimic professionally (five years ago - was it really that long ago?) there was a lower likelihood than now, but many users still mute their computers because of annoying sound; from Windows, auto play video and music from websites, and so on.

I did, however, include basic audio, such as 'keyboard sounds' to enhance the experience if sound was on.

I used a series of dialog boxes that displayed, explaining what to do. The user had a short period (long enough to read and do, so the time varied according to the length of the dialog), after which the dialog dissappeared and Mimic did it automatically. Easy enough if you include the action(s) for 'do it for me' in each dialog.

I could share the callouts with Capture and Flare so the help files matched the video, down to the dialog level.

If you are going to use audio as well, which can be very effective (I'm wearing my trainer hat now), you will have to make sure it is professional. Otherwise it can be distracting.

I remember spending hours with a manager as he struggled to do an effective voice over. Towards the end a friend, who worked as a radio announcer, called around. He picked up the script and read it cold. Even unrehearsed the first take was far better than anything we managed.

HTH

[schultza]

Thank you! That insite is very helpful. I had not thought about users not having audio, but that makes sense since I only have audio with my headphones.

[teacher_to_techie]

I am brand new to MadCap Mimic, and a non-Flare user. My company recently charged me with researching and evaluating screencasting software options, which I ultimately narrowed down to Mimic, with the hopes that someday we'll take the plunge into Flare, as well.

As far as using audio goes, my initial gut on the matter is to make the determination whether or not to use audio depending on how polished the final production needs to / realistically can be. I am a one-man (well, one-woman ) technical writing department, so if the project has considerable time constraints recording voice-over that's polished enough to be client-facing may not be possible. If it is a project that I can take my time with, (such as the "Key Features" video I'd like to embed on our "Getting Started" online help page), it will include some well-scripted, clean voice-over. If it's a one-off situation where a client would benefit from a video with voice-over, but the turn-around time is tight, I'll walk the line to make it as "good enough" as it can be under that sort of blurred circumstance.

In the cases when voice-over is not possible, I still wanted some sort of audio component to make the video feel more professional and less static. This is the case with the videos I'm whipping up to accompany our release notes, which happens here about every three weeks. I'll have a one to two day time frame to screencast new features, not leaving me enough time to do them voice-over justice. So instead, we are investing in an audio file from http://www.shockwave-sound.com/ to lay down as a soundtrack underneath these sorts of videos. I'll also use part of the audio file in the intro/out'tro slides of all movies, as well. These sorts of movies aren't interactive, so can simply be uploaded to YouTube.com, and embedded in the appropriate place on our online help site. If a user is annoyed with the audio, the embedded video can be muted with one click of the volume control.

[jknasinski]

I'm currently doing about 20 short video tutorials that correspond to task topics in my help file. I'm not doing audio for a couple of reasons. First recording audio (voice narration) is almost impossible in my work environment since we are in a very open cubicle arrangement. We have no quiet rooms where we could record. Second the audio would be very time consuming when changes are needed or the U.I. changes and I need to update the videos. Lastly, we don't have the time or money to translate audio. A text based video is easily translated.
If we were doing full fledged training or marketing videos than that would be a different situation and we'd probably want to find a way to do voice narration, but for short video tutorials that will be part of the help file, just using text boxes works fine for us.