MBA873 How to Shoot a Demo Video

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Heyoo. Welcome to the $100 MBA show, your practical business podcast that goes deep and gives you the business lessons that you need to build the business that you want. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar MBA and and webinar Ninja and in today's episode you will learn how to Shoot a Demo Video. In this lesson we're gonna focus on how to shoot a demo video for any digital product, whether it's a book, a course, a piece of software, anything that you can demo on your computer. Now, just because it's a digital product, it doesn't mean that you cannot be on camera. In fact, we're gonna be talking about the choices you'll have to make whether you're gonna be on camera, off camera, or both. I'm going to give you my step by step game plan, exactly how to organize your demo shoot, what decisions you have to make, what software you need to use, and what order to take on these steps to make sure that you have a pro demo. Having a demo for your product can really, really increase sales. People want to see what this thing does. People want to see what your course can deliver for them. People want to see this software in action. It's the best sales tool that you can have on your website. Nothing irks me more than going to a website that has something for sale. Whether it's a course, a book, a software and they don't actually show me the product, it really annoys me. I want to see what it's going to look like when I buy. This puts me at ease and also gives me an idea. If this is A good fit for me. So we're going to solve that pain. We're going to really give our customers what they want. And we're going to do it in a way that not only sells their product, but educates them. As many of you know, I've been in education all my life. I've taught in the classroom for over 13 years. I have a master's in education. So for me, sales is all about teaching. And having a demo is a great way to teach to sell. Let's get into it. So you can get all the steps down and you can run with this plan and shoot your next demo for your product. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. The first thing you need to do when you're shooting a demo video is you need to write down a goal. What's the goal of this video? Now, you might think this is pretty obvious. Like the goal is to sell more of whatever I'm selling, right? Well, not necessarily. For the most part, you know, demos are for sales. You put them on your sales page. But you also use demos for support tutorials. So maybe sales is not the first priority. It's maybe education. You might be shooting a demo video for launch partners or affiliates so they understand what the software is all about. I just recently shot a video like this and it has a different tone. Yes, I'm selling the product. I am selling the idea of webinar ninja in my example. So my partners are on board. But I'm a highlight different things in this demo. Things that highlight why this is such a great software and why it's going to sell itself, basically. So write down your goal. What's my goal with this video? Once you've done that, things are going to get a whole lot easier. The next step is to decide how will I present this video. You have a few options. You can go purely screencast, meaning that you're just going to record your computer screen and, you know, talk with your mic over what you see on your computer. And you're gonna walk people through how to use your software or how to navigate through your course. You get the point. Some people also show the screen along with a small like picture in picture box of their face with their webcam. These are all great. But my personal favorite is to combine screencast with on camera video. This means that I'm on camera talking to the audience and we have set up a studio for these types of videos. But you don't have to have some elaborate, you know, studio. You just have a well lit area with a plain background. And you could use your iPhone for video. Please do not use green screen. That looks horrible. But the point is, is that you're going to be on camera, sometimes talking directly to the audience, and then you're going to cut to your screencasts. In film terminology, this is called B roll. It's called B roll because it's like secondary a B. You get it? But in a demo video, you're going to have tons of B roll because you're going to be showing a lot of screencasts. But I like this combination because it's a lot more personal. I'm talking to them face to face, and then I cut to the actual product. Now, whatever you choose, the first step when it comes to creating your video is not white balancing your camera or doing a mic check. It's opening up your laptop and writing down a script. I can't emphasize this enough. Scripting a demo video is where the magic happens. This is where your video actually gets created. The words that you actually say on the video have an incredible impact. I know that sounds obvious, but a lot of people don't take time to script their video videos. I would say most people wing it or at the very most, have a outline. I think outlines don't cut it. You have to script it. This has to be super on point. And if you think I'm being a little extreme here or like, you know, omar, I know what I'm doing. I know my stuff. Ask yourself when a company like Squarespace spends millions of dollars for a Super bowl ad, you think they script their video? Of course they're going to script their ad. You better believe it. So script if you want quality. So step three, script. Step four, do a table read. You want to read out your script aloud. Maybe have somebody with you read along with you silently. They can give you suggestions, or you can feel how natural it is, and you can make an edit to the script so it could feel more natural. Maybe you can cut some things. Maybe you're belaboring a point. Too much point here is, is that read it aloud so it can be natural when you actually shoot. And this applies even if you're off camera, even if you're just going to be doing all screencasts. All right, you got your script. You did a table read. Let's do it. We're gonna do some screencasts right now. If you're doing on camera video, this is a little bit more tricky. And we're gonna talk about that after we talk about how to do the screencast videos. So with screencast videos, what you wanna do is you wanna record your audio first. So if you're doing a purely screencast video with no video of yourself, whether on webcam or not, you wanna record the audio, just the audio, with a mic. I highly recommend you use a quality mic. One of my favorite USB mics is the Audio Technica 2100. And what you want to do is just record. You reading the script now, you might be thinking, well, what about the screencast? Shouldn't I be recording my video while I'm saying the script? Believe it or not, that's really hard to do. And it's actually easier to just record the audio and then record the video based on the audio. I remember when I was first taught this, the guys@wistia.com actually taught me this in a blog post. And I thought, mm, this sounds backwards. Like, maybe this is not gonna work. I had to try it for myself and trust them. And once I did, I was like, wow, this is so much easier and faster to edit. So what you do is first record you reading your whole script as if you're just presenting your script. And of course you don't wanna read it, you want to perform it. Now, once you have your recording done, what you're gonna do now is play the recording. And remember, if you have to edit the recording beforehand, go ahead and do that beforehand so it's nice and clean. But now you're gonna listen to that recording and, and you're gonna run your screencast based on the recording. So what I like to do is I like to play that recording on my phone, I listen to the audio with my headphones on my phone and then I go through the actual screencast video while listening. So I just follow along. I just do what I told myself to do on the auto recording. This makes my life so much easier. And I just go through the whole screencast that way, no matter how long the screencast is. And then once I'm done, I take that video recording of the screencast and I pop it into my video editor or my screencast video editor and we'll talk about that in a second. And then I drop my audio and I just make sure everything's aligned. I cut any of the video that's extra and everything just follows the audio. This is so, so easy to do once you try it. Now you might be asking, what software do I use to screencast? Now, you may not have to buy software if your screencasts are pretty simple. And you don't want to do anything fancy with editing. Apple QuickTime has its own screencasting abilities, but if you want something a little bit better, I highly recommend Camtasia. Now I used to use screenflow for Mac because Camtasia wasn't available for Mac for a long time. But now Camtasia is available for both PC and Mac and the Mac version is brilliant. I absolutely love it. You can not only record your screencast, but you can do some pretty fancy editing. You can highlight, you can circle things, you can zoom in and out. It's really pro. So I highly recommend Camtasia. It's the most expensive one, but I highly recommend it. It's really worth it and I'm not getting a dime for saying that. This is just my personal experience. So now that you have your screencast video and your audio all synced up, you're ready to render it out and you're ready to share it with the world. You can upload it to YouTube. You can use Wistia for your video hosting if you want to go really pro. Or Vimeo for that matter.

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So what if you're doing on camera plus screencasts? This is going to get a little tricky, but it's actually not that hard. What you're going to do is that you're going to actually shoot your video as if the whole thing is on camera. And yes, I know there is screencasts, but what you want to do is you want to shoot the whole thing all together because you want to make sure the audio matches. You want to make sure your on camera audio matches your actual screencast audio. Often we're using a different mic when we're on camera versus the mic we use on our actual laptop. The exception to this is if you're using your laptop to shoot the video like a webcam. So what I do is I like to shoot the whole video in front of the camera with the mic we use for shooting. We like the Sennheiser ME 66 shotgun mic. We love the shotgun mic because it picks up some of the ambiance of the room. It still sounds crystal clear, but it doesn't sound kind of fabricated. We also like a shotgun mic because you just prop it up with a boom pole and it's outside of the shot. And the audio sounds great, even though I have no mic hooked up to myself, to my body. We used to shoot with lapel or lavalier mics, but the audio sounds a little bit too close, and it looks kind of weird that you have a lapel mic when you're shooting on camera. As our friends at Wistia say, it reminds people that you're shooting a video. So we love the shotgun mic from Sennheiser, and we use that for our videos. So when I'm shooting the video, I actually read my script. When it's time for the B roll or the Screencast videos, I don't need to look at the camera. I can just keep my eyes down on my laptop and read the script verbatim. My audio is going to sound seamless from on camera when I'm looking at the camera to off camera when I'm on my screencast and showing people my software or my course or whatever. Now, once that video is shot and it's edited, I'm lucky enough to have a New York Film Academy graduate editor and Nicole Baldino, my co founder. She does a rough cut where she just cuts up the video. So the audio is exactly where it should be. And of course, the B roll is missing, the screencasts are missing. I haven't shot the Screencast yet, But she renders this video without the screencast, so I can listen to this video while I'm shooting the screencast and do the same exercise as I would if the whole video was Screencast. Just as I explained earlier. I listen to the video as I'm shooting the screencast, so the timing is perfect. I then give those Screencast videos to Nicole to the editor, and she drops them into the project. And then I'm on camera, then off camera with the screencast, and it's seamless and it's gorgeous, if I can say so myself. No, but seriously, the video looks great because I'm Talking personally to them on camera, face to face. Then we go through the screencast. They see the product, they love it. Then we go back and we show some emotion. We get to use some titles. It looks wonderful. So there you have it. That's how you shoot a demo video like a pro. Whether you are on camera and then screencast or purely screencast or whatever you choose. Remember number one, you gotta make sure you have a goal and you script this thing. You will thank me later. Having a great demo video can add so much value to your sales page as well as adding value to your support materials and when you're reaching out to partners and affiliates. Thank you so much for listening to the 100 MBA show. Hope this episode was beneficial. If it was, let us know in an itunes rating and review. We'd love to hear from you. It's your way to show your support for the show. If you love us, if you get anything out of these episodes, that's the way you can show support and lets other people know we what the show's all about, what you love about it and gets us a little bit more exposure. All right, that's it for me today. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. Allow time to do this. Screencasting and demo videos take time. If you think it's going to take you a week, it's going to take you two weeks. And the longer the video, the longer it's going to take. I did a long demo video for partners, about 10 minutes long, and it took us about two weeks to do. I know if I made a shorter video, like six minutes or even four minutes, I would be able to pull it off in like a week. So keep that in mind. If you can keep it shorter, the faster you can get it out there. All right, I'll check you in the next episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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