We've all been there, clicking on an instructional video only to sit through minutes of backstory when all we wanted was the solution. In a world where attention spans are shrinking, viewers want one thing: get to the point.

For this episode, we're revisiting a fantastic conversation with Doug Brunner, Customer Education Manager at TechSmith. Doug knows firsthand what makes instructional content work (and what makes viewers click away). He shares why leading with the 'how' beats starting with the 'why,' and reveals the secret to keeping audiences engaged from the first second.

You'll hear Doug's biggest pet peeves about instructional videos, his take on the webinar vs. video debate, and some insider tips on using Camtasia and Snagit features that can transform your content.

Learning points from the episode include:

• 00:00 - 05:06 Introduction
• 05:06 - 10:01 Maximizing impact and the power of saying "no" to requests
• 10:01 - 14:03 Webinars vs videos: Pros, cons, and when to use each
• 14:03 - 17:31 Why defining your goals first changes everything about your content
• 17:31 - 21:58 Doug's biggest instructional video pet peeve
• 21:58 - 25:15 The truth about attention spans, how long do you really have?
• 25:15 - 31:09 Three go-to features in Camtasia you should be using
• 31:09 - 32:18 Why the viewer is the hero of your story, not the cursor
• 32:18 - 37:30 Doug's three go-to tools in Snagit for better visuals
• 37:30 - 42:32 Opinions on human avatars and generated voices in educational content
• 42:32 - 43:34 How to determine the perfect video length
• 43:34 - 46:36 What really counts as "bad video" and "bad audio"
• 46:36 - 48:06 Using rounded corners in Snagit and Camtasia
• 48:06 - 49:05 Outro and final thoughts

Important links and mentions:

• Connect with Doug on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/doug-brunner-b193abb
• Explore our Tutorials and Training: www.techsmith.com/learn
• Check out our Webinars: www.techsmith.com/webinars
• Camtasia: https://www.techsmith.com/camtasia/  
• Snagit: https://www.techsmith.com/snagit/

For us, internally, we're like, yeah, this is super important. People need to know why

this thing is important and why they should care about it and, like, the value

of it. And then we'll teach them how to use it. And what we noticed

is that everybody was just like skipping that part. They didn't care. They didn't care

at all. They were like, just teach me how to do the thing, teach me

how to use the tool or teach me the workflow. You know, it's that same

idea of like, the audience is essentially like, yeah, just shut up and show me

how to do it.

Hey, everybody. We're here sitting down in the studio with one of our techsmithies, Doug

Brunner. Doug, welcome. Glad to have this opportunity to talk with you about your role

as customer education manager, as instructional designer, all those things. So welcome.

Thanks, Matt. It's good to be here. So, Doug, tell us a little bit about

your. Just give us a brief overview of your background and what you do at

TechSmith. Oh, man. How far back do you want me to go? Yeah, not

too far. Okay. So I started working

here at TechSmith roughly eight years ago. The majority of that

time was spent as an instructional designer. The past handful

of years, I've had the pleasure of managing our customer education team.

So that team is made up of all of our instructional designers, our

information developers, our webinar team, and

strangely enough, also our localization coordinator who does localization for the whole

company. So we have some keen insight there.

Yeah, that's awesome. So first, from your perspective, how would you say that

you use video from a day to day basis? Me

personally? So I'm gonna take a step

back for a minute and say, as an instructional designer, I used to live and

breathe in Camtasia. When we were making tutorial videos, I was in there.

I swear, it was all day, every day. Now that I've moved into a

management position, I've really switched at this point. I live

and breathe Snagit, and I use Snagit pretty much

all day, every day. It's like, it's. In a lot of ways,

it's kind of like taking the place of Camtasia for me because I use it

so much as a communication tool between me and my

team or between like my team and other teams. And so I'm

using a lot for like those one off videos where

it's like, okay, I need to talk through an idea and share

it, or like, I need to get feedback on this thing, or I need to

like disseminate a decision that we made and make sure everybody's on the same

page. I just, I use it a lot as a communication tool, so I don't

know, I've. I've really switched how I use videos. Like, so much of it used

to be like, instructional content and now it's more, you know,

communication. Yeah. So I inherently get right.

Like, because we work at TechSmith, we use our tools probably more than

everybody else in the world. Let's say. Let's do hypothetical here, Doug.

We. Let's say you leave tomorrow, you go take another job. You're gonna be

a customer education manager for Acme Corp. Right?

Yeah. How would you continue to use

TechSmith tools? Oh, man. So

I would demand Snagit. Or maybe demand's the wrong word.

I would get snagit somehow. Even if I had to sneak it in, I'd be

like, I have to have Snagit. And in fact, I would even pair it

with like, Snagit and Screencast at this

point, because I use the two of them together. Like, the whole

ability to record my screen and my webcam and me like, talking

through something and then do like the share link to Screencast

and being able to just quick, like send that link to you and be like,

matt, can you watch this and comment on it like that?

That whole workflow, I like, I can't

imagine going back before that. It's like the dark

times where you're like, right, yeah. You had to like, type out super long email

and like, I think about. Like video reviews even. Right. Like now in

Screencast, you can, with the. Be able to have the timestamps on the videos.

It makes such a difference. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yep, I would. Yep. And. And

I know people that don't have that

opportunity and they're still like making a video

and then like emailing it to someone or getting

a link to someone somehow. And then that person, that poor

soul, has to like, watch the video and write out the timestamps,

like at 1 minute, 12 seconds.

And then. But to try to explain themself, and then they have to do all

the timestamps. And I remember doing it. I remember going through those pains. We first

worked here at TechSmith and we didn't have like the commenting on videos.

So I don't know if I went to another, you know,

Acme Corp. Or whatever it was, I would. I would be like, yes,

I want Snagit and Screencast. Those two together, I feel like, are.

That's the winner for me. I'd want the whole team to have them, but at

the very least me. Yeah, yeah. Gotta get, gotta get everybody. Right, right.

So you know, you got a lot of things you're trying to do.

Obviously looking at your team, you've got a lot of products that are being

supported. But what's the hard part of your

job? Do you think if you had to say, like, the hardest part of my

job is, how would you complete that sentence?

Geez, I would say the hardest part of my job

is just deciding where to

like, spend our efforts, spend our time, like, where to focus.

I am like totally fortunate where I have a team of

experienced professionals that are good at what they do

and they have like a breadth of skills. And so in a lot of ways

it's like we look at how we could educate our customers and we could

be doing so many different things. And so it's really just like,

okay, we're deciding where we can be the

most impactful or where we can make the biggest impact on our customers and saying

like, okay, we've got to focus our efforts here. And like, I

know we've got these other ideas, we have so many ideas, but like, we can't

do it all. So it's, it's really like prioritizing like what,

what's most impactful and like, and also for like a customer education

team like ours, it's also then like, what's, what's most

scalable? Because like those, those, like, those

don't always go together. So it's like, yeah, so it's like what's most scalable and

what's most impactful. And so like really just deciding how to focus in our

efforts on that and saying no to some things and like

really making sure if we say yes to something that it is like something that

we can prove out as like, this is going to make a big impact.

So if you were to look back over the last year, what would you say

is a project or particularly maybe it's video related, maybe it's

not, but a project that you or your team has done that you say this

is a thing where you think you had the biggest impact.

Yeah. So I'm going to go back a couple years on this one.

I'd say the biggest, most impactful thing we've done in the past few years

is really ramp up our live

webinar program, which isn't our most scalable

tactic, but it is still scalable. But ramping up our

live webinar program has made a huge

difference. And it's something where it was like an

idea like, hey, we should do some webinars. And we started doing some

and we survey our customers after we

do them. And so what we noticed was like, hey, our customers

really like these. They like the content, they like our approach.

But should we spend more time doing them and kind of on like

from like a kind of like agile kind of like testing method of it's like,

well, you know what, let's just kind of reach out a little further. Let's do

a little bit more and let's see what we can learn. Let's see what we

can learn. Let's try to like iterate and grow. And we've like iterated and

grown that program. That program has matured so much over the

past few years that we went from running like a

handful of webinars a year to like we run a handful of webinars a

week. And we've involved people from around the company.

There are people that, people that never thought they would ever be presenting a webinar

are now like part of our webinar is doing presentations and

it's very genuine. So like it's not just random people, but it's people who are

coming on and they're doing things similar to this. They're talking about how they

use our products or how they get value or like the impact our products

make. And they're just teaching, they're just very instructional, very authentic.

But that webinar program draws in a ton of people and those

numbers are growing and the impact they have is growing.

To me, I'm really proud

of my team for not losing

our focus there because we're like, this looks like something that's impactful. And

even when we started doing the webinars, we couldn't quite prove it all out yet.

We're like, hey, we know our customers really like these. They get a lot of

value out of them. But what's the roi? And we were

like, we can't quite measure that yet, but we know there's something here, there's

a lot of value. And so we stuck with it. We kept our focus.

Eventually we were able to connect all like kind of the back end systems and

we were able to prove the roi and thankfully it proved right.

And so we've ramped up even further since then. But like,

I'm proud that we like, we kept our focus and like we've grown the program

and it's to, to a point now where it's, it's, it's like

very mature and we're still, I mean we're still talking about what more we could

do with it. So it's, it's still like very exciting for us. Well, I do,

I do love the webinar program and I love that you're involving so many other

people and perspectives. I think that's really powerful. I want to ask maybe, maybe this

is a little bit of a question. Maybe you don't want to answer, but I'm

going to ask it because that's what we're here to do is like, if

senior leadership came to you and said, hey, Doug, we love what you're doing with

the webinar program. We think we need to 10x it, but we don't think live

works. Do you think you could do what you're doing and scale it

into video? So, for instance, we obviously make a tool that you could record

something that was from a content standpoint, equivalent to

a webinar in terms of the delivery of you've got a person, you've got

screen content. So, so why not? What

are the barriers there? Yeah, so if they came and they made

that either the ask or the demand, I would push back hard

and I would say, yes, we could totally make

that video content. But based on what we know about

why people come to the webinars,

it would really cripple the program if we just offered

just pre record, pre recorded video. And the reason is a

couple, actually there's a couple reasons. One of them is that we found that people

really like scheduled learning. They're like, I'm gonna

carve out this 30 minutes or this hour on this one

day and they can schedule it in. And then it's fixed on the calendar.

You got it? Yep, it's fixed on the calendar. You've got it. And so there's

like a certain amount of appeal there. And we don't know exactly why that is,

but. But we just know that it is. And a lot of people really, really

like that. The other thing is, like, a lot of people really like

being part of that live conversation. During the webinar. Some people

ask questions and we have like a support team there that answers questions which people

love. But even just being part of like the live presentation,

it like offers different value to people. And it's another thing that,

like, once again, we're not completely certain, but we believe it has a lot

to do with just like people want authentic connection with other people. And like

a webinar is a way to get that, like we're, when we're on, we're

performing our webinars it's very like we're being very authentic

selves and we're just talking through, you know, what, what we do and how we

do it. And so a lot of people like to see that experience live and

they like to be able to ask questions if they can. So the prerecorded video,

I mean that, that would have appeal to some people, but I think we would,

it would really kind of cripple the program in a lot of ways. There's so.

Okay, so off of that and I totally, totally understand. Right. And I think it's,

you know, it's always weird when we talk about things are like that, like, oh,

well, Camtasia is not the answer. Right. Because it feels weird because that's what, that's

what we're about. But so I'm curious. So let's say I come to you

as, you know, someone from another company. I'm just like, hey, Doug, I want to

pick your brain about what you do in your program. What

advice would you give me about when I should be using

pre recorded, like Camtasia videos? Not necessarily webinar format.

Could be tutorials, it could be information sharing. Like when do I use, when

should I be using as an instructional designer? Camtasia? Yeah, it's almost

like when, when would you use a prerecorded video versus like a live event? Like

that? That's tough. I'm not exactly certain

what we've learned. Yeah, but it doesn't have to be a webinar either. Not trying

to replace those. I'm just saying kind of maybe in general. Yeah. So

I think like, what we've kind of learned is that a lot of it comes

down to personal preference, is like there, there are plenty of people that would just

rather watch a video about something than show up to a live event. And

that goes both ways. So we feel strongly that

you need to offer both, like the beauty of

like tutorial videos or even like long form, short form

micro videos. The beauty of that approach is it puts

the viewer in control of what they're seeing and what they're doing. So if they

want to sit down and watch, you know, a five minute video, or they want

to sit down and watch an hour long video, like they do that on their

own time. They could do it on any device, they can do it on any

platform. Like it's, they're very much in control of that situation. So like they want

to, they want to engage in learning, they go in, they pick which ones they

want to watch and like they can just they can get in, they can get

out, they can learn the thing they wanted and they can move on.

Where like, with like the live approach. Right. They're very much like

investing in us. Like, they're like, I want to sit down, I'm going to hear

what they're saying. Kind of forgot where I was going on that

answer. That's okay. Yeah. So. Okay, let me maybe reframe it a little bit because

I want to step away from the kind of the webinar piece of conversation. But

like, are there things instructional designers

specifically should be using Camtasia videos for?

Are there like best practices, best types of videos? Like, if you could, what's.

What's the top three reasons you would say. Yep, Camtasia. Right answer. Because what I've

heard from you is like, hey, we love these webinars. I use a lot of

snagit for information communication. But from if I'm an instructional designer

and I'm maybe I'm new to the field, I'm like, gosh, when, when should I

make a video? What, what types of things should I make videos about?

Right. So I guess my answer for that would be like, if you

have a specific set

of content or goals that you need to hit with

your instructional content, like, I'm thinking, like when we say like, what things,

like the biggest recommendation for instructional designers using

Camtasia, like, the first thing I think of is

like high stakes learning.

Putting my, Having trouble putting my, you know what, wrap my mind. My mind. That's

okay, Doug. You know, that's, that's part of the conversation, right? I think so if

I can add what. Here's something I think about is right, like anytime you, particularly

if you, anytime you have anything that you want to. Someone to know about

or to learn that is screen based,

obviously Camtasia should be the first choice, right? Like, oh yeah. Unless.

Unless there's like a very heavy, like you've got

to do. Like, you need them to act in very

specific ways. Like, simulation might be better for that. But like,

I, I'm, I'm loving like, so I'm in social media all the time because

of my job, but I'm loving seeing like, I, I think I just got fed

something from a Google, like a TikTok about Google Docs or

Google Sheets and it was like how to do something and I'm like, oh my

gosh, like, it was so clear that that was the best

solution to share that information with me. Yeah. Someone could have said,

oh, did you know you could select this and this and hit this and do

that. And I'll be like, I don't know, but like seeing it

as a video man, I was like, I'm going to learn that. Yeah, it's much

more engaging. So there's. Yeah. And I feel like videos have a lot of different,

different roles or places for them. Like, I guess

back to your question of like, when would like those must have situations is when

like you have for example, software or screen video that are

like, this is like, I need everybody to know how to do these things.

Yeah. And in my opinion that's where video comes in and plays

a really strong role. Whether like you're putting together a short course

that you need everybody to take or it's a few instructional videos that you need

them to go through. But it's like, Matt, I need you to know this thing.

I need you to know it well because this is like part of your job

or this is part of how you interact with the team. But there's

like, there's a strong outcome related to that educational content. So it's

like video to me is like perfect for that because you're like, okay,

like not only have you seen the video, but you can watch it again if

you need to. And ideally with like a tutorial video or

an instructional video, unlike a webinar, instructional video is

much more planned. It's much more. It's short, it's to the point. I

guess it doesn't have to be short, but it's like it's controlled. It should be

controlled. It should be very efficient, very effective. Get right to the point,

get through the content in a very like relatable and implicable way and

like cut out all the crop. So it's like ideally it's the most like

effective delivery of content right there. So it's like if I

need you to know this, I'm going to make like a well crafted video for

it and like I can, I can get to you a message in five minutes

that like Live Doug is going to ramble on for like 20 minutes.

Yeah, right. Or longer. So like that short, that like very

effective short, like video I think is like to me that's

the impact of like video is being able to deliver that. Well, thinking

about you, the, the rambling on, I'm guilty too. Right, so no judgment there.

What pet peeves do you have when you watch other people's instructional

videos? Like what, what just bugs you about what, what do people do that you

wish they wouldn't? And it

doesn't have to be from your team. It could be like you're watching something. At

home or on YouTube. Yeah,

I think, I think my best. My biggest pet peeve, this one. This probably

sounds silly, but, like, I think my biggest pet peeve is when, I

don't know, I see people trying to, like, pretend to be authentic about a

thing that they're teaching or they're talking about. So it's not so much

instruction related as it is like, I'm trying to connect with this person. And

so if I see people kind of going over the top about something or just

rambling on and telling stories that,

like, are tangential to what they're trying to teach me, and I'm like, no, no.

I'm really here to, like, learn about this thing. And I really appreciate the person

taking the time to make the video. But, like, you don't need to tell your

whole backstory. It's like the cooking blogs, right? Yes. It's like, just jump to the

recipe. I don't care about your grandmother in Italy. I'm sure she's a wonderful lady,

but I don't need to know her life story. Right. And, like, to some extent,

like, I think the content creators that do it best find ways to, like, weave

their story into the instruction so that you do build a connection with them

as they're teaching you. And it doesn't. You're not like, okay, where's the fast forward

where I hit that jump 30 seconds ahead? Instead, you're like,

they use their story to boost the

instruction in a relatable way. So that's like the

opposite side of that pet peeve. It's like, when people do it well, it's like,

oh, dang, that sounds like a really cool guy. And I learned so much.

This is great. As opposed to like, ah,

here he goes again. It reminds me, I was building out content for our TechSmith

Academy. This is a long time ago. And it was. We're doing a piece on

lighting, and I had this whole really great section. I wrote about, like,

certain things, why they were called certain things in lighting. And

I remember one of our video producers at the time

just came to me and said, no one cares.

No one cares about that. And I'm like, but it's so cool because

I was excited about it. But he was right. It did not matter to

the content that we were trying to teach. And I think that's kind of that

thing, right? It's so easy to get caught up in the. Especially when you're an

expert, right? Yeah, It's So it feels like it's so easy to get caught up

in that information that you're like, oh, gosh, yeah, everyone should know about

how the barn doors, where that came from, actual barn doors that Thomas

Edison had. See, I needed to work it in someplace, but. Right, but,

like, yeah, so I totally understand that. Anything else that really bugs you

about tutorial videos? No, but I can touch a little bit more on that topic

that you were just kind of getting at, like, adding extraneous information.

One kind of interesting story from back when I was much more focused on

instructional design is our tutorial videos are usually around,

like, three to five minutes. And at one point

here at TechSmith, we migrated all of our

tutorials into Wistia, which allowed us to see, like, engagement

trends on our tutorials. And one thing

that we noticed right out the gate is we had this really weird engagement trend

where, like, people were skipping, like, the first 30 seconds to a minute of

our video, like, all of them. And we're like,

what's going on here? And what we quickly realize is that

when we would do our little tutorial videos, we would

start by talking about, like, the value

of this feature. And it was very much like TechSmith speak of,

like, here's this thing and why you should care,

essentially, instead of, like, getting right to the instruction.

And for us, internally, we're like, yeah, this is super important. People

need to know why this thing is important and why they should care about it

and, like, the value of it. And then we'll teach them how to use it.

And what we noticed is that everybody was just, like, skipping that part. They didn't

care. They didn't care at all. They're like, just teach me how to do the

thing, teach me how to use the tool, or teach me the workflow.

And so we then worked through all of our tutorial videos, and we, like, remove

that chunk, or actually we just, like, shortened it to, like, a sentence. Like, we

give them one sentence of a value statement and then jump right into the

instruction. And we saw the general engagement of our

videos go up quite a bit. And so it's just like,

you know, it's that same idea of, like, the audience is essentially like, yeah, just

shut up and show me how to do it kind of thing. We're like, okay,

sorry, that was. That's what's relevant to them. The other stuff, maybe

somebody, someplace, sometime. Yeah. So I'm sure there are plenty of people that liked it,

but the majority of the people, they were like, just. Just get to it. Man,

get to the instructions. We're like, we can do that. Yeah, I love that. So,

okay, so how long do you think you have to grab someone's attention

and make sure that they're pulled in, given what you just told us? Right, right,

right. To make sure that they're going to actually watch that whatever piece of content

you're making. Yeah. So for, for, for videos that are like

public facing, like people are choosing to be there, like they're not forced to watch

these. Yeah, not compliance. Yeah, not compliance. Because it's different. Right. But for, for

those type, for these types of videos, I, I say you have seconds.

I don't know the exact amount, but within that first handful of

seconds, maybe they'll give you more. Like, if a person's like really interested in the

topic, they'll suffer through more. Right, they'll suffer through

more to get there. But like, if you haven't captured

them in the first handful of seconds, I think you should really be taking a

hard look at, like, how am I opening my videos? Like what, like

what's my strategy here at the beginning of the video? To really hook people,

make sure they, you know, make sure they have a solid sense of what you're

going to be talking about and like your effectiveness as a, as a,

as a presenter or as an instructional designer. But I would say give

them the first handful of seconds. Ideally you should have them by then. If not,

you've got issues. So I want taking that

idea because we just both said, oh, you know, for the public facing, you're

choosing to be there. Right, right. Why is it that we

treat people who are in a compliant situation or locked

into the seat that has to watch it? Why do we treat that different?

Why do we assume that they're willing to suffer for 30

seconds a minute when what we just said is that when people choose to watch

it, it's like five seconds. I'll say, right. But why do

we do that? Why do we think it's different for, why shouldn't we treat the

compliance situation similarly? Like grab their attention, try to get them to want

to watch this thing. I think that'd be great. Yeah, I think

that'd be great. I think when we

make particularly we'll say like internal compliance

training videos.

I think there's two things at play there. One, I think we know we don't

have to because it's harder. They're gonna have to sit down and watch

this. But I think the other thing is

that like a lot of internal training teams, they

are up against super tight deadlines. Not that

like a customer ed team like mine is not like we have our deadlines as

well, but the amount of people I know that

work in internal training and they're like, hey, they get a request like,

Matt, we need you to make this video. Could you have this done

tomorrow? And when you have that tight

deadline, it really like squeezes you, I don't know,

it like squeezes your video production down to like the bare bones where you're like,

listen, I can't make this fancy or interesting or whatever. I

just, I need to get this specific content out the door

by tomorrow. If I can make it engaging, great. If I

can't, apparently it doesn't matter because it's due tomorrow. And so like

that like tight deadline, I feel like really

cramps people's ability to like invest more time and make them

engaging. No, I totally get it. Right. Like,

I think it's, it's always making trade offs in the internal training team. What

I, I remember working for an organization, the backlog of courses was

like three to 400. Yeah. And there was always more coming in.

Right, right. So total. Totally understand. So with that said and

that kind of as a, a backdrop, what are two or three

features in Camtasia that you think

could help? I'm not gonna say it's gonna solve that problem.

It won't. But what could maybe help alleviate or that you

are your go to tools that you're like, hey, this makes for a better

video.

Hmm. I get two or three. No, I want.

If you don't have two or three, you can do one or two. No, no,

I do, I'm just.

This is the point where I have to open up Camtasias. Like, okay, what do

I do all the time? Well, okay. So I think in a lot of ways

what makes,

I think a lot of times when we say engaging, we think like,

woo. Like, hey, like fireworks and shiny

things which they have their place. I feel like those are more

like maybe drawing attention to things where

in a lot of ways if you cover content well, it's kind of engaging

in itself. Especially if you tell like a nice narrative

around it. Like you're telling a good story. Like a story that

connects. So if you have the content side down,

like if you're telling a story that connects, that's going through the

instruction you need to get across, that already

helps a lot. Once you get that into Camtasia,

I think the features that help empower that

storytelling in a lot of ways. For me it's

probably just the custom animation. I use custom

animation all the time because with the custom animation,

you can control the viewer's attention where they focus.

So you can zoom in on, say, a part of the screen

that is like, I want them to focus right here and only here.

They don't need all the rest of the stuff I've recorded or the rest of

the stuff that's in this frame. You can zoom in to focus their attention.

You can pan to whatever it is the next thing you're going to show

them. So you can guide them through the complexity of

whatever UI you're teaching them or whatever sort

of software you're training them on. You can guide their attention throughout that

story and really make sure that they're not being distracted by

extraneous details and stuff like that. So

just the simple, like, zooming and panning, to me, is, like, an absolutely

excellent place to start. If everybody

could. I don't know if we could just make sure everybody could learn and, like,

master just the zoom and pan already. I think it would improve

so many people's videos. But. So that's custom animation. I think

the second one. General. Yeah, Call auths and annotations.

Yeah. Okay, so I think for the. I think for the second one,

actually, I'm gonna. Yeah, I think for the second one, I'm gonna go

with just general annotations. Being able to, like,

point at something on the screen to express, like, this is

important, or, like, to be able to, like, point out more information

pointed specifically at that object on the screen. So you could be

anything from adding arrows to, like, a title

or adding, like, a circle or a box or like, a sketch

motion. Like, hey, this. You know, like a circling object there. This

is what I'm talking about. This is what's important. So

using callouts to be able to even focus the customer's

attention even more, or even adding in information. So

just simple annotations. And then you can

actually use one and two together. You can animate the annotations in and

add a little bit more engagement to it. So right there,

there's a ton of value in that and being able to

capture their attention and focus their attention there. The third one,

I would say, is the cursor. So, like, one thing that

Camtasia does better than any tool out there is it allows you to

have control over the cursor in your screen recordings,

which, like, I can't emphasize that much. I can't

emphasize that enough, because in a lot of ways, the cursor

really is, like, the Hero of the story. If you think about the amount of

times people are recording their screen and they're trying to show somebody something and they're

like taking their cursor and they're like, it's this. This is the important thing right

here. Or they're just trying to get, like, really smooth cursor motions.

But no matter what you do with the cursor, there's one guaranteed truth

about it, which is that your customers or your viewers are

following the cursor with their eyes. It's like the most direct

path to, like, this is what they're looking at. They are watching the cursor and

they want to be able to follow what it is you're doing. And so Camtasia

makes it super easy to take the cursor. You can actually put in

a custom cursor. So it's like super high quality. You can make it as

big or small as you want. So it's like super easy to focus their

attention on that cursor. You can control the path of where the cursor

goes. So even if you recorded your screen and you're doing like, crazy stuff,

you can be like, no, no, no. I want it to just very smoothly glide

from here to there. And then with some of, like, the new features coming

out, you can even add like little wiggles to the cursor. You can add like

some cool physics to it that it's. In a lot of ways, it's kind of

like adding a little bit of like, delight or like engagement to it, just to

make it a little bit more fun, but having like, complete control over the

cursor in a lot of ways, like, it's.

It makes the videos more interesting. It makes them

easier to follow, it makes them look more professional. So, like, if

you have a super small cursor, you've got like a nice big, fat, like really

high quality cursor that's super easy to follow. Like, it just looks real

slick. So it just allows you to like, pretty

easily make your video, like, look more professional,

easier to follow. It just kind of like you can like up your instructional design

game with like, minimal investment, which is super nice. Well,

I love all those and I love that Camtasia makes it so easy compared to,

like, other tools that I've used where you have to hand, like, start going, like,

we'll call it After Effects, right? Like, oh, my gosh. To make something move or

appear in After Effects is so much work. But I do want to push back

on one thing, and I hear this A lot. I hear this a lot at

tech. That's just maybe it's my pet peeve. We often say the cursor

is the hero of our story, and I'm gonna. I'm gonna disagree with you.

Let me have it. I don't think it's the hero. I think it's the

Yoda to the Luke. It is the guy. The guy. It is. It is.

You know, in the. In the classic arc of the story where you've got the

hero's journey. Yeah. You know, because I think. And this

is gonna sound very pandering, and I don't mean it to sound that way. The

viewer is the hero. Is the hero we want them to be. The one

who goes through the journey comes out on the other side

as the winner versus the curse. It's not the cursor. Right.

Yeah, you're right. You are right. You changed my mind on that. Yeah, I think

I was just. Yeah, no, we say it all the time. Yeah, I think I've

heard it so much, but yeah, I like the way you frame that the viewer

is the hero, or at least the main character, and then the

cursor is the guide. Yeah. We're just leading you through that

information. Well, Doug, we've talked a lot about video, but

it's interesting. As a manager, you talk that you use Snagit all the time. And

I'm sure it's images. I'm sure it's the video. It's kind of the whole bag

of tricks there. Same question we asked about

Camtasia. What are your two or three go to

tools inside of Snagit? Okay, I'm gonna

split that into kind of like two parts. Cause with image, if we're taking just

image capture. So my. Go to scroll and capture. Oh, my

God. I don't. I couldn't leave. I couldn't leave. Do you auto scroll, or do

you do the one where you scroll it yourself? I do the one where I

scroll it myself. I don't know why. I just. For some reason, like. Me too.

Yeah. So anyways. But I love it. I don't know how I'd live without

scrolling capture. I was using it this morning. I use it all the time.

It's just anything that scrolls through that window. Oh, it's

beautiful. So I'd say scrolling capture, and then along with that, I use

the cutout tool a lot. So, like, for example, just this morning,

Our team uses WordPress as our content hosting platform, and we're making

some changes to the backend. And I Had to take a scrolling capture of the

big long editor page and I was like, okay. I

wanted to provide some feedback on some changes. And so it's like, oh, cut out

this part. Don't need to talk about that. Cut out this part, don't need to

talk about that. And so you can just quickly like shorten up that long

capture. Can I ask you though, are you. Do you leave in

like the cut. Marks or you're straight? No, no. The only reason I would ever

leave in the cut marks is if I need the person

to know that I remove something. If that's not.

That's not usually the case for me. So I just cut it out. I don't

care. Whatever. I know some people find them really fun. Yeah. But yeah, it's interesting.

I don't think they're. Yeah, personally I don't think they're fun. I just, I think

they're great for showing like, hey, Matt, I sent you this thing

and you can then very clearly see I removed something from it.

I've removed content. Yeah. So you can say. So then you can see like, okay,

there's something here. And if you want to know more, you could ask me about

it. That's great. But I very rarely need people to know that. So I'm just

like chop stuff out. Awesome. So

another, another tool there for. Okay, so I'm jumping to the video recording side because

that's like. Honestly I almost use that as much these days.

So just recording video. Honestly in

Snagit, being able to do like the Pip and then also

coming up soon, I think it's already released on the Mac side. Coming out

on Windows soon. But the background noise removal is

so good, which is so nice. So it's like a favorite feature. But it's really

just like, I don't know, some built in goodness. It's just on. It's just on.

But it works so well. I was demoing it at a

conference not long ago. We were there. I was demoing it at Dev Learn

and man, you could record video like at a conference, tons of people

around and it cut out like all of the background noise. It was absolutely amazing.

So the background noise removal to me like game changer. But yeah,

recording video. And then I sometimes use a screen draw. I don't use it a

ton, so I don't know if it makes like favorite status. But being able to

like draw little arrows or be able to like circle things as I'm, as I'm

like talking, that was, that's pretty nice. But really Like, I guess my other go

to is just being able to like cut out little mistakes in the Snagit editor

after I've done recording. Just trimming out the front

or the beginning and the end of a video is great. It's not a

great experience. It's hard to do in Snagit, but it's

great to be able to do it. Have you ever made the mistake where you

recorded something and then you're like, oh, gosh, I really should have just done this

in Camtasia because of the amount of edits I need to make? Oh, I've done

that plenty of times. Yeah. And then you're like, I'll just send the video to

Camtasia and they're like, oh. But then I can't edit the cursor. Oh. Because then

like once I'm in Camtasia, I want to do all the normal Camtasia things and

then. Yeah, it's. It's a whole like cyclical thing. I don't know.

Yeah. But I. But I'm with you. Like scrolling capture is great. I love

Snagit video recording for just simplicity sakes. Because then,

then I feel like I don't have to do the work that's in Camtasia

as much as I know I can use Camtasia, but it just saves me like

the feeling. Maybe it's that just internal feeling. And also when you're, when you do

video recording in in Snagit, like when you hit stop,

the video is already rendered. So you don't have to re render it. So

there's no rendering time. It doesn't really matter how long you record. When you hit

stop and snag it, the video's done, it's ready to go. So like you

hit the share link button, it just uploads it to Screencast and you're like,

here's the link. All done. So like that workflow is great.

I'll just add one of my favorites is where you do

selection of an area and then you can do the auto replace background.

Oh yeah, in the image. Yeah, in the images on the image side it's just

so. So most of the time it works really, really, really well if

gradients are a little tough. But I just love that it's just so simple. Yeah.

And like, just makes my life that much easier when I just want to take

something out. Yeah. You know, another, another really simple favorite

of mine that I think a lot of people look past is just the fact

that you can just crop like an

image capture after You've done taking it by just, like, dragging the handles on the

canvas. Like, I feel like I look past that a lot. Not everybody

really knows that you can do it, but just, like, you take your screen capture

and you're like, ooh, there's like, a little extra stuff over here. And just being

able to, like, click the handle on the canvas and drag it in, it's like,

there you go. That's done. Just so

some little simplicities like that are great. Yeah. Well, as we wrap up,

let's do some hot takes here. So let's make these fast and quick.

Okay. We don't need a lot of detail necessarily, but I'm gonna ask

you about a couple different topics here. Let me bring it up. So I've got

those ready. Okay, we're gonna. Fast and furious. Yeah. Yeah.

Avatars. Hot take. Like, the realistic looking

AI avatars. Human avatars. AI.

That's my hot take. I hate them. I hate them, everybody. Yes.

That's my hot take. I hate them. I cannot stand them. One reason why

I hate things that are trying to be authentic but are clearly not.

Like, the faux authenticity drives me nuts. Like, I would rather

look at a cartoon avatar because that's not pretending to be anything. It's not. I'm

like, it's a cartoon. I get it, it's great. But show me a. An AI

generated person. They're like, they're trying to make look like a real person. I'm like,

no, don't. Just. I would rather be. I'd rather

be a robot talking to me. Because it's. Then it's not trying to, like, trick

me. Yeah. Like, I feel like AI avatars are trying to trick me.

I'm like, just don't. Please just. I would rather just do something

else. Please, just, you know, I don't know. Yes,

anything. Okay, well, let's go to the other side, though. AI

generated voices. Okay, so AI generated

voices. I think. I think they're. There's good and good and bad to them.

I'm not nearly as averse to them because it's. I mean, it's.

I don't know, something about them is. It doesn't. It doesn't feel like they're trying

to, like, trick me or anything like that. It just feels like it's like, okay,

so a person didn't like the sound of their voice. They use an AI generated

voice. That, to me is, like, fine, as long as, like, their lips aren't moving

and the narration is completely different. Like, you know, if you use it in

Camtasia with, let's say, like, a still image of your face with, like, maybe an

audio visualizer around it. And you've got an AI generated voice.

@ some point, you know, we'll. We'll be able to, like, clone our own voices

and be able to do that. To me, that's. That's fine.

Yeah. It doesn't really bother me. Okay, Doug, we're going to put the.

You on the hot seat. Yes. If you're an instructional designer or you're managing your

team, how or when should they be

using those tools, AI avatars and AI generated

voices? As an instructional designer, like, I.

I can't say when you should use an AI avatar. I honestly don't know.

Like, we haven't. I haven't seen a

situation yet where I'm like, wow, that's. That's great. I can speak to, like,

the business side of it. If you're like, hey, we need to make

videos that include a person in them for some reason. Like, we

need to have a person in them, and we're gonna be localizing that video

into 50 other languages. Okay. An AI avatar

is a perfect, like, business reason to do that.

But what you're saying you don't know why you need a person in a video

though, right? Why is that? Yeah. Cause, like, as in from an instructional designer, the

reason you include a person in the video is often to, like, build connection

with the viewer, which I think is why I'm so adverse to, like,

AI avatars. Because that's not building connection. That's building. It's. It's.

It's not real. Like, so if I watch a video with you, Matt, in it,

I know, like, Matt made that video. If I have questions about that video, I

can talk to Matt. Matt, maybe you maybe even shared a story or two that

you. That you like. Like, we talked about crafting your narrative or your

story. So I learned more about you, and, like, I build a connection with you,

and I can associate what I learned with you. When you

put an AI avatar in there, it breaks

all of that. It really does. And so from an

instructional design standpoint, I don't know how I'd recommend using AI

avatars when it's just AI voice or just AI narration.

It's a little different because you could be just teaching something, just

some very straight instructional

video, and you're just like, I need to teach people how to use this thing,

or, I need to teach some very straight compliance training

using AI generated narration, I think would be Fine. I just

need people to know this. And this AI

narrated voice sounds real enough or sounds close enough to my voice

that people will look past it because the importance is on the instruction

there. That's what the focus is on. I think you can get away with it

and I think people could do that, especially if they're like us and they have

to localize their videos into a bunch of different languages. It makes it easier

for them. A lot easier, much more scalable. So yeah, I

think they have a place there. So yeah. So I think, I guess my take

is it's going to be a balance, right, between the business need and the kind

of. That whatever else you're trying to achieve with whatever instruction you're creating and

that's always good, there's always going to be trade offs. Right. Somebody might

say no, we want to face because whatever reason, okay, fine, but

it's not going to be for you. It's definitely not going to be your go

to. We're not going to see Doug, the Doug AI avatar

presenting anything anytime soon. And I think it actually touches back on the question you

were talking about, the difference between like internal videos you have to

watch and external videos that you want to be engaging. I think you're

going to see a lot more avatars used in those internal videos that people have

to watch as opposed to like external

facing, public facing videos where you're really trying to capture

attention. I don't think you're going to see AI avatars

in them nearly as much. Yeah, well, we'll see.

Okay, couple more hot takes. So quick, fast answers.

Preference on video length. I actually don't, I don't have

a. I don't. I think the content and like the purpose should set the

length. So like if I need you to learn some little quick bits of things

or like little inspirational content, like sweet 30 second

little vertical video, like engage me, get me drooling over something.

Matt, hook me, bring me in. But if it's like, hey, I want to

learn how to become an instructional designer, like I don't know, 30 second short

form video just doesn't feel like the length. So it's like

give me a full on course. Like I don't at that point maybe

you have shorter videos and you got a whole bunch of them strung together. Maybe

it's a long form video. To me it doesn't like let, let the content

determine how long the video should be. I sure hope becoming an

instructional designer takes more than 30 seconds because I, I paid

a lot for a master's degree. Yeah, yeah, same. So it's like. Yeah,

yeah. It's either that or you're watching like a thousand 30 second videos

and like at that point, like that just wasn't the right

length for those videos. Yeah. Bad video.

How do you feel about it? Bad.

Yeah, yeah, bad video. Do you mean like poor

quality video? I'm not defining it boring. You get to define that.

Oh, God, it's. I mean, I guess it depends. If

it's like a bad video on YouTube, that's fine. You just hit next and don't

watch it. But if it's a bad video that I have to watch, it's

like in some internal training. Oh,

that's the worst. Because then you have to suffer through it and you know, and

you can watch the little time countdown, you know,

and if it's like a 30 minute bad video, it's just, don't worry, we'll. Put

a quiz at the end. Yeah. And it's, it's a drag and drop or throughout.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. A little pop up that sees if you're paying attention,

you know, like click list to get 1,000 points. You're like, oh, points

for what? Yeah, yeah, I know, right? Points. So you can brag to your

friends. I'm gonna print the certificate today. Yeah.

Bad audio. Bad audio is.

That's a non starter. Yeah. You can't start with bad

audio. We have our own internal Techsmith research showing that. It's like

if there's anything, if you're gonna invest money in

any new hardware, you start with a great microphone, you

start with a great audio setup. Whatever you can do to get high quality

audio. And like our new background noise removal in both

like Snagit and Camtasia helps with that. But there's no,

there's no replacement for just good quality audio.

And like. Yeah. So we know it like, if you start watching a video and

the audio is all garbly and hard to understand, people are out of there,

man. They're not, they're, they're not going to watch it. They're not going to be

engaged. Yeah. All right, Doug, as we wrap up here, are there

anything, is there anything that we did not talk about?

Any topics, questions you wish we would have asked that we can

end on that. We'd end on today. Like, what's anything pressing in your mind?

Based on the conversation we had.

It'S hard to look past the AI avatars that was kind of the big pressing

one because I have some strong opinions about them,

which is good. I Think it's good? Yeah, it's good to have a strong opinion

about something like that. Yeah. And it'll be interesting. It'll

be interesting in a year or two to have that same conversation, see if

anything has changed or not. Yeah, because like the technology is going to

improve and I am interested to see if the responses I just gave you changed

because like, what if you get to a place where you can't distinguish the difference

between an AI avatar and like a real person? That's

kind of scary. What does that mean? That's scary to me. Yeah, but what's that

mean? And what are you. Is it going to be the death of

video in some ways? Because we're all going to just be everywhere. Like you

can make as many videos as you want really quickly with you in them. We'll

make a bunch of doug videos. There's 10,000 matt videos. Yeah. There might be

already 10,000 mat videos that no one has watched. Right, right. So

our AI avatars going to get more people to watch them or is

there just going to be more videos out there? More videos,

More videos. It's gonna be the depth of video. Yeah. Okay. Hot

take topic. How often do you use rounding corners in

Snagit or Camtasia when you're making content?

Not really that much. I'll

sometimes use it in Snagit, particularly if I've taken like a

screenshot of something on like the Mac side where they often round the corners anyway.

So it's nice to be able to like round the corners of the canvas to

fit it so that when I like copy and paste or put that somewhere else,

it doesn't have like the extra stuff around the corners.

In Camtasia, the only time I use rounded corners is when

I'm, you know, if I'm doing like a rev style recording, like using the

Camtasia rev workflow. But that's really. I mean it rounds the corners for me.

So I'm not actually doing it, it's just auto. You're choosing it? Yeah, I'm choosing

it. But yeah, so I'll do that sometimes.

Really more for just looks. It doesn't. It's not like there's no like

instructional value to it. Yeah, it doesn't change the learning.

No, it looks. No, no. Yeah, it can look. It looks good now because that's

kind of like the in look for now. But you know, who

knows, few years later it will change. Yeah. A few years later it might be

like, no, no, give me those like real hard edged corners. How dare you round

those corners. Yeah, exactly. So we're. See. Well, now we'll just set the trend into

the future. We just got to. Yeah. Bring it back. But it's nice to. I

mean, it's. It's nice to be able to have that option which is like. That's

how I look at it. Like, it's definitely. I. Like there are tons of people

I know that do use them a lot. So it's like, it's nice to have

that option, but, yeah, sometimes I do it. Yeah.

Sounds good. All right, Doug, Well, I appreciate you sitting down with me and having

this conversation and going through all these answers. I know it's always hard to be

put on the spot when you don't know what's gonna be asked, but so grateful

for that. You took the time, and we'll have to talk again in another year

or so. Talk about avatars more. Cool. All right. Thanks, Matt. Appreciate it.

I want to thank Doug again for sitting down and talking with me in studio.

What a great opportunity to hear from him, to learn from him. Obviously, he's got

a lot of great ideas about video and video usage, particularly as a

customer engagement manager. Well, that wraps up the show for today. We hope that you

like it. We hope you like hearing from these different voices. I thought this was

a great opportunity. As we were interviewing Doug for these other things, I thought, you

know what? This is a great episode. So I'd love to hear from

you. If you got ideas, suggestions, things you'd like to need to talk about or

people you'd like me to talk to, reach out at the visual

loungexmish.com and what we hope is that every time you hear the

episodes, you listen to the show, it inspires you, it helps

you, and you desire to get a little bit better every

single day. Thanks, everybody, and I'll see you next time.