Are you planning on recording video footage from your PC screen? Before you actually begin, you should know that there are a few best practices that could make a world of difference to how your video turns out.
To ensure your video looks polished and professional, you should start with these 5 best practices:
- Close unnecessary apps and background processes
Recording videos from your PC screen requires system resources – mainly processing power and RAM. That is why you should make sure as much of both are available, and close any apps or background processes that you don’t need.
If you do encounter performance issues while you record videos from your screen, you may want to look into other steps that can help free up resources.
- Check that no updates or scans are scheduled
Another step that can help make sure your recording doesn’t encounter issues is to check that no updates or scans are scheduled. More specifically you should check your virus scan software, and make sure Windows Update isn’t about to start.
- Make a decision on the mouse cursor
In some videos you may want the mouse cursor to be visible, but in others it may not need to be. By making that decision in advance, you can take steps to hide the mouse cursor or at very least make sure it is positioned out of the way if it isn’t required.
Conversely if the mouse cursor is an important part of the video you can make it more visible instead by increasing its size or changing its color.
- Keep the areas that are recorded clean
If the video that you’re recording encompasses areas that you have control over, you should try to make sure they look clean. For example you could remove stray icons from the desktop, make sure there aren’t too many open apps on the taskbar, and hide icons in the system tray.
- Record the largest frame that is possible
As a rule you should always record the largest frame possible from your PC screen, purely because the resolution of the frame will be the resolution of the video that is recorded. If you record a small frame, you’ll end up with a low resolution video that has poor definition especially when you view it in full screen.
In some cases it may be best to maximize the window that you’re recording, or run apps in full screen mode if the option is available.
Together these best practices should ensure that your screencasts look far more impressive and you can click here if you’d like to start trying them out right now. Once you do it will be easy to see how much of a difference they make.
Make no mistake there are other specific steps that you can take to improve the quality of your videos too. That said the best practices listed above are the most universal, and can help with almost any video recorded from your screen.