YouTube Your Training

ROBERT GREEN: My name is Robert Green. The title of the course is "YouTube Your Training." We're going to talk about the concept of taking your training program to a video-dominated format.

I don't necessarily mean you have to put it on YouTube but kind of YouTube style-- short video segments where you can actually learn by watching and doing. Can we go ahead and let in everybody else? We're going to go ahead and start.

PRESENTER: The problem is they have it set up that I can't scan them till five after.

ROBERT GREEN: Ah, damn.

PRESENTER: Yeah. I'd like to [INAUDIBLE].

ROBERT GREEN: [LAUGHS] Glitch in the system. So again, my name's Robert Green. Most people know me like from the "CAD Manager's Newsletters" and Cadalyst Magazine and stuff over the years. I'm a recovering mechanical engineer. That's the way I like to describe myself.

I kind of got sucked into doing CAD management and such. I actually volunteered for the duty. And one of the things that seemed like it came along with it was the training process, the in-house training process. So I've been keenly interested in that. Technology, obviously, has changed quite a lot.

I maintain some resources that you guys may want to participate in. There's the CAD Managers Unite Facebook group. That's pretty lively. We do a lot of polls, and it seems like a lot of people swing by there. Pardon me.

And there's my website, and there's my email address. I'll never send you any spam, I promise. And I'm happy to hear from you. This is my 23rd year doing AU. Man, if you don't want to feel old, think about that.

OK, first things first before we go ahead and get started blowing and going here. This was originally designed to be a 75 to 90-minute course, and I've got 60 minutes. So we're going to go quick. And I am going to give you a lot of ideas more or less in chronological order.

How many of you are already doing some type of video training program at your [INAUDIBLE]? OK, so you're looking to get better or optimize it or have ideas for how to do it better and such? Is that a fair description? Cool, all right. Well hopefully, everybody will get some good tips and tricks out of this.

The first thing that I always like to convey to anybody who asks, how do I get started doing video training stuff, is I say, look, video is what delivers the training. But a great video of bad training isn't very good. Good training is good training. Video is just the way that it gets dispersed or delivered.

So I'm going to focus a lot on not only, how do you prepare videos, and how do you get set up to do that, and all that. But I'm also going to talk about how to put together good lessons, be a better presenter, just kind of everything from A to Z. So it's basically everything that I've messed up in trying to learn to do this is what I'll share with you.

And we've got a few last-minute folks coming in here. So if you would offer them a seat, that would be great.

I think what videos are really great for is they use a "show me" paradigm. And what's really cool about YouTube is, has anybody here ever figured out how to do something around your home or fix something by going to YouTube? And this is where every hand goes up. I mean, it's like you can't argue with it, the show it to me, show me how to do it, and I'll learn.

And what's really cool is pedagogically, this cuts across everything. You think, well, millennials want to go in and look at videos. Well, everybody wants to go in and look at videos. So it pretty much works for everybody.

It's self-paced, which is great. You can go in and learn at your own speed. It allows people to repeat training as much as they want to. It allows me as a CAD manager to not run the same training class over and over again, which is fantastic. It allows me to migrate new employees in and show them how we do things.

However, the burden is still on me to have good training, compelling training content that people actually want to look at. And what I've seen is that that means by definition, it needs to be brief, modular, to the point. Good content means good training, whether it's on video or in person.

Now one of the things that I really want to say here before we get started is think about a problem you might have where you were gonna look for an instructional video. I'll give you an example. I could not find the cabin air filter in my car to save my life. I mean, I'd been in there underneath the dash looking for 20 minutes, couldn't find it. I said, this has got to be on YouTube, and sure enough, there it is.

Video is like two-minutes long. So I'm now going to spend two minutes looking at something that I'd already wasted a half hour on. And you know what I'm doing when I get into the video? Oh, will you get to the point? Will you show me where-- I'm fast forwarding, right?

So people have zero patience for stuff anymore. They just want to get in there, and they want you to go directly to, what do I need to do? If you think about it, that's how you answer a question at somebody's desk. You go right to the point. You don't have a three-minute intro. So there it is. There it is.

Pre-planning. So let's say that we're going to start doing a video training program of some sort. It's kind of nice to think about, how am I going to do this, and how am I going to get started, and pick a good first project or two, and get your feet wet before you jump in completely. So the first video project that I want to tackle, it's going to be short, to the point.

It's going to be something that I understand well, so I'm confident instructing it in the first place. It's something that my users are asking me about on a repeated basis, like, how do I make a PDF file, seems to come up a lot. So maybe that's a good one. Something that needs to be well-suited to a "show and tel" type of learning paradigm, and for the most part, that's software. Show me how to move around the screen and do the clicks and picks, and I can learn how to do it.

My goal is to pick something that's short enough, easy enough to demonstrate, and easy enough for me to instruct that when I roll these first couple of things out, they're going to be good, and it's going to be a success. You don't want to do a two-hour Stanley Kubrick film for your first video. You want to do something simple, right? Make sense?

All right, so a lot of people want to go to the moon on their first thing. Now let's try something easier. Can I suggest standards? This is something that all CAD managers pretty much have problems with anyway. So why not show people standard ways we do things?

How do you pull up and start a new drawing with a standard template? How do you start a new project? How do you make a new project directory? Let's just do some videos for things like that. These are good examples-- print plot, something people would want to watch, something that new employees might need to understand. Those are really good things for some of your first video projects you're going to do.

Now in order to get this really off and running, it's a technology problem. It's a hardware problem. It's a software problem. It's a teaching problem. There's a lot of moving pieces in this. So I'm just going to go through them basically in the order in which you need to get set up.

Hardware, software, accessories, configurations. What kind of input and output formats are you going to need to worry about? Hopefully, the more you think about this stuff up front the less you'll have to redo later. And why do you think I say that? Because I've had to redo a lot of stuff. Nothing I share up here is something I haven't screwed up, trust me.

Generally speaking, anything that runs your CAD software well is probably going to be a just fine to record video. Now that doesn't mean that it will be just fine for a rendering or producing video later, but it will be just fine for recording it now. So if your CAD runs well on your machine, you should be able to do video recording on that machine. You might notice a little bit of a slow down, but it probably won't be much.

If your CAD is on the ragged edge of not running well on that machine, you may notice more lag, but you should probably still be able to record. But you probably will notice it slowing down. The real reason you'll notice it slowing down is because recording video files is putting a lot of data onto the disk. So solid state disks pay big dividends in doing video recording. Always goes without saying-- buy more machine than you need, and that'll give you a little more overhead capacity for when you're trying to record stuff.

So operating system-- a lot of times I get the question, should this be seven, or should it be Windows 10? Should I be doing this on a Mac? Well, the thing is let your CAD stuff dictate the operating system.

So if you're running on 7 Pro, that's fine. Any of recording utilities I'm to talk about will run great there. Not a big fan of trying to record CAD applications by running emulations inside of Mac boxes, because then you have several different layers of stuff going on. And I know that this whole Mac/Windows thing is almost like a religious debate. But I just record it on Windows 7 machines for the most part is what I use.

So 7 works well. 8 pretty much all got bypassed, but there's some old laptops with it, which will work OK. And Windows 10 I found to be more problematic just because of drivers for hardware devices and audio hardware devices that I'll tell you a little bit about later.

At some point, you may have to back away from a Windows10 box because your audio hardware won't support it, or you got to go out buy new audio hardware. Don't know. You'll find out when you plug it in and try to make it work. I will just say my bias is towards Windows7 still, because it seems like everything plugs into it and works.

In the end, hardware is going to matter because faster processors means that things are going to process quicker later. So the faster clock speed you have on the processor, the better it'll be. The more RAM you have, obviously, the better it will be.

Solid state disks make a huge difference. Especially when you're converting video at the end, a lot of times you'll get these little kind of skips. Kind of like would be analogous to a record skipping, like a little digital glitch. And usually, that's because of I/O error on the disk. By going to solid state disks, you largely get rid of that problem.

So you can record videos now on pretty much your CAD machine, even if it's older and slower. But later, you'll probably want to produce and render your video on a more high-end hot rod style computer box. Faster hardware means faster production and rendering of your videos in the end.

Software-wise-- first of all, I do not get paid to sell Camtasia, but this may seem like a Camtasia commercial at some point. Has anybody ever used Camtasia? You guys like it? You have the hands up?

AUDIENCE: Yeah.

ROBERT GREEN: Yeah, it's nice utility. Really is. And I'll kind of explain why I like it so much as we run through here. Really thing I really like about Camtasia, it is essentially a screen and audio grabbing record utility. So if it's going through your machine, it records it. Whatever is on your screen, it gets the video.

Whatever you're saying through the microphone it records. If you have a webcam turned on, it gets that. You can record several different tracks of-- you could have music, say, underneath your talking.

I mean, it's a pretty professional video editing application. Supports just every formatting option and output format you would probably ever want. It's just kind of like the Swiss army knife everything it does-- fades. It does dissolves. You could put this stuff on TV, and you would never know where it came from.

It has a single format, Windows and Mac. So this means I could record my stuff on a Windows machine, and I could send it over to somebody in the Arts department. And they can pull it up on Camtasia for Mac and go right away with no format conversion, which is fantastic. And there's no other utility I can-- that I know of where I can do that.

This is $199. So it's not free. But what it delivers for $199 is fantastic. You can go download it and try it for free for a while, but I just can't imagine doing training stuff without it, honestly.

There is the link. The company that produces it is called TechSmith. A couple other things-- Tech Smith also produces this thing called Jing. It's kind of like Camtasia's little brother.

And its forte is in recording short duration video segments, which is a lot of times what we're doing-- two to three minutes or something like that-- and then pushing it up onto the internet someplace or your extranet, or whatever you guys want to use internally. So the limitations is it only records so long, and it only outputs in so many formats. So if you want to do downstream editing, it's kind of restrictive. Upside-- it's free. And you can go get it right there at TechSmith again, and the link is Jing Tool, Jing-tool. And it's pretty neat you could go in there, get your feet wet with it, and see if you like it, move forward from there.

Autodesk produces a tool called Screencast, which allows you to record what you're doing in Autodesk tools. And so that's the upside. And it's also the downside, because you can't record something that's not an Autodesk tool that has Screencast support. So if you wanted to, hey, look here is-- here's how you set up your network drive. Well, that's going on in your operating system, so a Screencast isn't going to capture that. So you've kind of think about it.

So it runs on anything that you're running your Autodesk software on. It's pretty tightly integrated. And it supports most of the tools, and it seems like it's supporting most of them. One thing that is cool about it is it kind of shows what command you're using at any given time on a timeline down at the bottom. So it's kind of neat to show people how to use a command feature or what things to click and pick.

Extremely restrictive in terms of what you can do to edit. You can basically only clip stuff away from the front or off the back, and it's non-negotiable in terms of the format. But it is really easy to use, no doubt about that. So you can go check that out at screencast.autodesk.com.

And then there is one utility that I want to recommend to everybody who ever does any kind of video editing, and that is called Any Video Converter. Is anybody using this? It's fantastic, isn't it? Yeah, it's great.

Basically what this is, is it allows you to take a video of just pretty much any format and convert it to just pretty much any other format. So if you're capturing stuff off of a YouTube channel or something like-- that you want to repurpose it, you can capture it down through any video converter and put it out, say, a movie file that could be run off of an iPad. So it's kind of like a Swiss army knife utility thing.

I wind up using it quite a lot to move things back and forth just very simply rather than having to go in through Jing or Camtasia to do it. It runs in batches, so you can get like 50 video segments downloaded. And you can convert them overnight. Just walk away and leave it for six hours and come back in the morning, and it's done.

Yeah, so it's a fantastic utility. I highly recommend that to anybody who wants to do their own video work. any-video-converter.com is the link for that, and that's free. So highly recommend that one.

All right, so that kind of gets us to our software stuff. Let me draw a few conclusions. The recording format or utility that you choose is going to lock you in via its format.

It's kind of like well, if you choose to use Inventor, you're going to have data that's formatted in Inventor files. If you choose a recording Screencast, you're going to have Screencast formatted files. Will that be a limitation down the road? Don't know-- guys, there are some chairs up here if you want to dive in.

So what you want to do is kind of carefully consider what you may be doing in the future. If CAD tips is what you're interested in, and it's all you're interested in, and it's all you'll ever be interested in, then Screencast is probably a really good choice. Because it's free. It runs inside your CAD tools, pretty simple use-- makes sense.

If all you're going to do is general purpose short videos that may be CAD, may not be CAD, and you don't have to worry about a whole lot of formats, Jing is probably a great choice. Because it's free, and it's simple to use. On the other hand, as technologies change and formats change and all that, will these tools be robust enough to keep up with all of that? How much are you going to need to edit and change things over time?

That would tend to indicate Camtasia. It's the more fully-functional tool. So I pretty much just always say get Camtasia, bite the bullet, learn how to use it, and it always works. Always does what I've needed it to do. And again, I don't get paid to sell Camtasia.

You ever seen a great video where the audio was just terrible?

AUDIENCE: Yes.

ROBERT GREEN: Sounds like somebody recorded it like with their dog in a laundry room or something?

AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]

ROBERT GREEN: It's funny. You only laugh if it's true. So you guys have heard that.

Part of doing a good video, believe it or not, is having the voiceover or the instructional part that where you're speaking needs to sound good. And it's not that hard to do, but you're never going to get great quality audio by plugging a $3 mic into the microphone jack of your laptop. So let's talk a little bit about what's required to really make that work.

At minimum, you're going to want a USB noise-canceling headset. Plantronics makes these. Logitech makes these. They're usually $40 on the low end up to as much as you care to spend. And then you'll need some sort of headphones so that you can hear what's actually being recorded.

Better would be some sort of a desktop USB microphone that actually sits there-- looks like a radio announcers mice-- with a windscreen and a pop filter. That will radically cut down on room noise. And when you say [PUFFS], it kind of peaks the microphone, and you really hear that.

When you do good quality recordings, you'll want some decent quality speakers so that you can hear what's going on. And I'm a real fan of the real good quality in-earbuds, like musicians use, for monitoring, so you can really hear what's going on.

It would be nice to have a wireless microphone so that if you were doing a training session like we are in here, you could simply run it into the recording machine back there and record the training, which we're doing. But the only reason we can get away with that is because I've got a wireless mic. So there you go. That's the kind of stuff that you're probably going to need to make this all work.

And I'll just tell you what I use. The desktop microphone that I like is-- it's by Blue, and it's called a Yeti. This is about $100. Professional quality USB microphone-- works great.

It's got a little switch on it where it only records what's in front and it rejects everything that's out to the side and the rear. So even if you're in a semi noisy room, you get a real clear recording of your voice. I use my old discontinued Skull Candy Full Metal Jacket headphones. Those are great.

This is a thing called a MudGuard. It's by a company called our Auralex. And it's a little foam thing you have-- this looks like a professional vocal booth is pretty much what you have on your desk. You put it behind the microphone.

And I use a Sennheiser pair of headphones for monitoring. And I've got a Sennheiser wireless microphone for live recording. These are in the handout, by the way. So yeah, there's a few hundred dollars worth of stuff here, but it allows me to record audio that sounds pretty good no matter where I am.

Where you buy this stuff is from a music store, like Musician's Friend or something like that. Where you don't buy it from is the 26-year-old kid who works at Office Depot. Because they don't know what they're talking about. OK.

Set up your rig. What is your recording studio going to look like? Well, on your desk what I highly recommend that you do is any speaker or microphone that you put on your desk have a sound dampening pad underneath it. You know what actually works fairly well is a mouse pad. Now, you can buy professional ones that are by a company called Auralex, and those work better.

I don't know if you ever heard of Training Class, but the guy is like-- he hits his mouse button real hard. And that comes through the microphone, and you can hear it in the training audio. So the isolating pads will get you around that.

A windscreen and pop filter that just sits in front of your microphone and your headphones. Also, I have a thing called a copy clip. You guys know what these are? Tags on the top of your monitor, and it holds your- any notes or whatever out to the side of the monitor, which is great for doing recording and having scripts handy.

Your environment needs to be fairly quiet. It doesn't need to be an anechoic recording studio, but it probably ought not be your cube out in the middle of the office environment. Should at least be a room that has a closeable door. Don't record in a lunchroom, bathroom, or something that really, really echoes, because that'll get picked up, despite the fact that some of the best Led Zeppelin records were done in a bathroom recording echo.

Get yourself a nice comfortable chair where you don't mind sitting still, but make sure it doesn't squeak. I've personally had a squeak problem with one of my chairs, and it became problematic. Plug in everything and reboot. Make sure that it works.

Problems I've had is I get out to do a recording, and it didn't find the USB microphone. Because it was plugged into the wrong port or something. So long story short, just make sure that everything that you're plugging in is found and that everything works. I always do a little test recording before I ever record my class and play it back, and just make sure everything's working.

You may want to make sure that everything is set to be your default device, like your default microphone, your default speakers, that kind of stuff. You'll see that in your system tray that audio actually plays back. And then, I'm also kind of superstitious. I want to be able to get all this stuff to work, and I want to be able to reboot the machine and see that it works again just in case I have to reboot in the middle of class. So that's kind of that.

What you've now got is the software-- you've got the machine. You've got the software on it. You've got the ability to record quality audio. So it's actually time to kind of get in there and start trying it.

So let's talk about what kind of-- or size video you're actually going to record. Well, I mean that's a valid question. Pretty much everybody is using some sort of high definition these days. I mean, you may even be using 4K resolution video these days.

However, not everybody who's going to watch your training is going to be watching it on a 4K monitor. So do you see where I'm going with this? The dimensions which you record should probably match the most frequent dimension in which the training will be consumed, if that makes sense. I may have to swap out batteries on the fly here, and I'm ready if that comes to it.

So the couple of things to consider there is that if you go to 1280 by 720-- now, that's a lower resolution HD, but it's the HD aspect ratio. And that'll work even on older monitors. And even on newer monitors what I like about it is it doesn't take up the whole screen. I can kind of push it over and use it on about 3/4 of one of my screens and still have my email client open underneath it, something like that. So I find that I pretty much record stuff at 720 it kind of seems like.

Now if you go to older iPads, they actually use the 1024 by 768 format, which is a different aspect ratio. So if you record in that aspect ratio then when you go on an HD device, you're going to get black bands at the top and the bottom. Otherwise, you're going to get black bands at the side. If you know for a fact that you'll be delivering all your training on iPads, record at an iPad resolution. Make sense? OK, so I won't pound it into the ground anymore.

But what you do want to do is use common resolutions to record. When you record the audio, make sure, number one, that it's receiving input from your microphone. And one of the things that you can do down in the system tray is you can look at where your default microphone is, and you'll actually see a little bar, a level bar, bouncing up and down. And that's good indication that you're actually getting some audio.

In Camtasia, they actually allow you to configure what resolution that the audio will be recorded at-- in other words, what the quality is. And you can experiment with this, but let me just give you this recommendation I always use 22 kilohertz, 16-bit mono. And if you're not really into auto-- audio, I know this is kind of Greek or whatever.

But what I'm trying to do is get a decent sound quality-- not like a CD but like a really good phone, like a really good landline phone. But there's no point in recording it in stereo, because nobody's listening to it on a stereo device. This gives me the best quality and the most compact file size, which is kind of the goal. Because when you're moving stuff over internet connections or-- that's kind of the way to do it. So that gives me good sound at a compact size.

Camtasia allows you to configure that. Most of the other tools just eavesdrop on-- you go into your control panel, and you set the defaults for your microphone. And that device may or may not allow you to set these parameters. I don't know. Depending on your equipment, you'll have to go explore that. But Camtasia allows you to set this.

So if you set things up correctly now, you'll be able to render your video out later much more quickly. Because the resolutions will be about right, and the file sizes will be more compact. So it's worth your while to get this stuff set up correctly in the first place.

Now, here's the thing. You produce a video, and somebody is going to consume that. They don't see you sitting there. They see your screen, but they don't see you.

So therefore, they can't see whether you're clicking the right or the left mouse button. They can't contextually hear that either. You're going to have to tell them, or you're going to have to show them.

So in Camtasia-- and actually, Screencast has this functionality as well-- you can turn on colored clicks so that when you hit a left or a right mouse button, you'll see a little flashing like a little orb or a ball with different colors. And that way the person who's watching your video can see whether it's a left or right mouse click. In Camtasia's case, I recommend that you have this turned on always, because later when you produce the final video, you can elect to turn it off. But if you don't record it in the first place, you're kind of stuck. So I would always recommend using these kind of tools as you build your video stuff in the first place.

Key is to convey the idea of left click, right click. And also, they will allow you to configure like a [CLICKS] for a single click or [CLICKS TWICE] for a double click, which is real subtle. And you can reduce the volume on that. Camtasia's the only one I know that does that. But again, I turn it on by default, and I just disable it later if I don't want it. That's real nice.

If you use both of those, then people can clearly understand what you're doing. This means that I don't constantly have to say, now, I'm going to left click. Now, I'm going to right click. I can just simply demonstrate it, and they contextually see what I did, which will make your videos slightly shorter, a little more compact, which is always good.

If you want, you can say at the beginning of the video, if you see a red flash, that means a single click. Yellow flash means a right click. Away we go.

OK, so at this point, here's where I kind of feel like I am. I've got the hardware, the video, the software. I've got the thing configured. I'm kind of ready to start recording.

So the question now becomes, what am I going to record? Are we good so far? What are we going to record? Reasonable question.

Well, when you're creating a class or a topic for anything that you're going to cover, I like to start with what's called a storyboard, which is just a very basic conceptual outline of what my video's going to do. What information am I trying to convey? And what steps am I probably going to have to go through in order to get there, so everybody's not self-conscious about being photoed?

AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]

ROBERT GREEN: So a storyboard's just a basic summation of what's going on, like this. In this video, we're going to explain the new plotter that's been installed up on the fourth floor. We're going to show you what name it is and how to connect it to your machine and how to plot out of it. That was it, right? Short intro.

Then, I'm going to show you the page setups that you will need to make sure your drawings are correctly configured, and I'll show you how to attach the right style table to it. And then, boom, we'll run through an example plot, and we'll be done. So that's kind of my storyboard, so it tells me what I'm going to do in what order.

Why do this? Well, it's to get your ducks in a row and get everything in the right sequence, because you kind of start recording a video, and here's what happens. Oh my god, I'm being recorded. I can't screw up. I can't screw--oh, darn, I screwed up. Has anybody ever done this? Yeah. Yeah.

My goal is to know what I'm going to do ahead of time and be as certain as I can before I mess up. And then later, by the way, I'm still going to produce course handouts, or cheat sheets. And so by knowing the order I'm going to go through it in, that's going to help me produce that cheat sheet much more efficiently later. The more that you know now, the smoother it is planned, the easier you can rip through this using a storyboard, the faster and better the recording will go later-- promise.

Now here's where I kind of diverge from where a lot of-- the way other people produce video stuff. And I just throw it out there for your consideration. It doesn't mean you have to take my advice, but it works for me.

What CAD people, CAD managers, are usually pretty strong at is walking up to a user who say, man, I don't understand how to plot, and you say, let me show you. And then, you just grab their mouse, and you walk them through it. It's very natural for us to do that.

So rather than sitting down with a blank Microsoft Word screen of death and thinking, how am I going to write a script for this video, I just turn on Camtasia and rip through this just as if I am demonstrating it to an imaginary user sitting there beside me. And I record it. The first pass through will be rough. Sure, I'm going to mess up. Who cares? This isn't going on TV. This is for rehearsal purposes.

This allows me to go through it several times until I get kind of comfortable with the flow of it. And I'll wind up getting some draft recordings out of it. So I call this "talking it through."

So get any example files that you're going to need-- if you're demonstrating attaching to a network printer, make sure your machine's attached to the network-- everything that you're going to need to demonstrate the concept as you wrote it down in your storyboard. And just do a dry run through it. Just pretend like you're doing the training.

If you screw up, keep going. Don't stop. Don't restart. Just keep going. It's like learning a song on the guitar. The more you go through it, the easier it gets.

It also teaches you not to be so self-conscious about being recorded, which is an issue. A lot of people freeze up when you say, oh, we're recording. So just pretend you're tutoring a user, record it, and you've got it.

Notice that I have not written anything down, nothing-- well, a little storyboard. But that's just kind of like three or four thing that I could jot down on a piece of notepaper. Here's where it gets brutal. Go back and listen to yourself.

AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]

ROBERT GREEN: How does it sound? How did it flow? Is this going to make sense? Do you have a trusted user who sits next to you? Or hey, could you listen to this real quick? Does this make sense?

Because if you storyboarded it, and you wrote it down, and you recorded it, and it still doesn't make sense to you, chances are you're missing something. So I use this whole recording rehearsal paradigm. I just go through it as many times as I need to get it smooth. Would you change anything? Would anybody who's helping you review this change anything?

Now here's what's really brutal. Do you like the way you sound? How many "ands," "umms," "okays," "you know," "know what I'm sayings," how many of those things creep into your speech pattern?

I became a profoundly better public speaker by forcing myself to go through this process. So you know not only what to improve in terms of the lesson plan of the storyboard. You know how to make yourself a more effective speaker and teacher. And it will help definitely.

You simply adjust, rerecord, lather, rinse, repeat. You just do this as many times as it takes to get it flowing the way you want, just many times as it takes. And as you get more used to the recording tools and all that, you'll find that eventually it doesn't take you that many times. But the first few times, eh, it's a little slower.

By going through this process of preparation, everything really should be pretty tight. Your lesson plan should be locked down pretty well. You should be going through it quickly without any real gaffes or hangups. And you know what? If you miss one word here or there, who cares? This is not going on broadcast TV. People really don't hold you to that high of a standard, honestly.

Now, when you do create this storyboard, I want to throw out a few things for your consideration. Always tell people what the point of the video is and show them what the completed state will be. In this video, we're going to learn how to plot out of the new fourth floor plotter. Show them a screen grab of that. Now in the first five seconds, they know whether this is what they want to watch or not, so that's done.

Give a brief overview first. We're going to see how to locate it in your browser. We're going to show you how to attach to it, how to use your right page styles, et cetera. Again, they know whether they want to continue. Explain the click and right click sound effects, and little red and yellow orbs. You're 10 seconds into this thing now, and everybody pretty much knows what's going to happen, what they're going to be shown, and how to watch the video, and more importantly, whether this is the video they want to watch or not.

Most people move the mouse faster than they ought to move it in a video tutorial. Because you know where you're trying to take the mouse. And over years and years of CAD use, you don't want the mouse to take a long time to get over to the other side of the screen. So what you do is you move it at warp factor seven, and the poor person watching this can't see where you were. So slow down and enable mouse trails so that you get that kind of dragging, blurred effect on the mouse as it moves across the screen.

What you want to do is emulate a casual training environment. You don't want to go too slow. You don't want to go too fast. Imagine you're talking to a competent user who just needs to be walked through the process at a reasonable speed. That's what I aim for right there.

Speak clearly, calmly, enunciate. Avoid your "umms," and "ahhs," and you're pretty much done. Make sense? Yeah. It takes a little while to get used to.

Please notice I've never written anything down yet. Now, I write stuff. I write a lot of stuff. But how do I write it? I dictate it, and then I allow machines to translate it as much as they can. And then, I edit it into final form. So every newsletter you've ever read I guarantee you is like me out on a walk or standing in a-- waiting for a plane or something like that. It's always spoken into a recording device.

So here's how I'm going to create my handouts. First of all, do you even need to do handouts in the age of YouTube? Yes, and here's why. Because they watch the video of how to click through a software application. And then they go back to their desk, and they need some kind of a cheat sheet to remember the steps, don't they?

If you don't give them step-by-step procedures for these software features, here's what's going to happen. They're going to get on the software, and they're going to do what they think you said, which they can't remember. Because the human brain forgets stuff startlingly fast. And now rather than not using a new feature, they will go in and screw up using a new feature, and they will create more problems than you had before. I'd almost rather not train than not give somebody a cheat sheet.

So guidelines for creating a good handout/cheat sheet-- screen captures. Picture's worth a thousand words, true statement. So screenshots are best with minimal texting between. So most of mine are like, go up to the file-based ribbon tab. Click this ribbon element. Your screen will look like this.

Now, pick this plotter. Your screen will look like this. Now, pick this page up-- your page setup. Your screen will look like this. That's what my handouts are like. And it's real easy to hand people those.

The good news-- handouts need to be written in the same order in which the procedure, the training procedure, was done. But since you have already nailed the order by going through your video rehearsal, you know exactly how to step through it. Because you've already done it.

Here's another beautiful thing. You can roll through the Camtasia recording and stop it, and get screen grabs right out of the video. So just boom-- you start putting that into your Word document. And if you can't remember what you said, just rewind it a few seconds, and listen to what you said. Your handout's now done.

This allows me to create training handouts in an hour where I used to just sweat over it for five or six. It's radically cut the amount of time. So just run through the examples, get your screen grabs, paste it into your Word document, add your descriptive text between the screen grabs. You're done; all there is to it. And the great thing is if you can't remember what you did, listen to yourself, and the more you listen to yourself, the more you'll think about your tone and how you speak.

Should you always record live training? Yeah. Why not? I mean, we're recording this. The worst cases we would have a train wreck, and you just delete some electrons. Yup, no harm done. A friend of mine, he puts a thing on his email, file a-- suffix at the very-- it says, no electrons were harmed in the sending of this email, or something like that, which I think is pretty cool.

If I'm going to do a live training, I'm going to record it. I take my laptop in there. I load up my software and all that. And I just turn Camtasia on. I take my wireless mic in there, and I just turn on Record.