We’ve just launched a new screencast for the Tinderhouse Publishing service. It’s the first time we’ve produced a screencast to explain a new launch.
The boom in online video over the past two years has gone hand in hand with increasing use of video to explain software and services. It’s so much more effective as a marketing tool to explain a product or service with audio and video than with static text and images.
A good screencast can shorten the purchase decision cycle, and equally importantly can help shorten the time it takes a user to become effective having purchased a new service.
There are a number of easy tools that you can use to put together a screencast. We used:

• Camstudio – for screen recording
• Audacity – for audio recording
• Adobe Premiere Pro – for editing it all together (but pretty much any video edit package would do)
• Dreamhost media conversion – to turn the MPG file into Flash video
• Flash Media Player – to embed the Flash video into the site

[Disclosure: I helped set up Tinderhouse and continue to act as consultant on marketing, PR and web projects]