We are often asked, “What do you need in addition to documents or scripts before you start producing videos with Videate?” The answer is very straightforward. You need a Dedicated Environment, Prerequisite Instructions, and Sample Data. Whether you record videos manually or use Videate to automatically generate them for you, getting these three things in order is key to success.
One of the greatest challenges of making software videos is updates. Every time there is a new release of your software you have to re-record some or all of your videos to bring them up to date. If you have well-written video scripts that follow a template, Videate can automagically make videos. If not, Videate now allows you to reuse the audio transcripts of your existing videos to quickly make new videos of your latest release.
We just launched our new Videate Chrome Extension that allows you to automatically create UI selectors directly from your application. Think of a selector as a pointer to a specific UI element in your app. Sounds techie and you may ask, “why is this so important?”
Here are the full results from our survey last month about software video production. Thank you to everyone who participated and helped us raise money for the American Cancer Society, Relay for Life.
We recently spoke with an expert video producer who makes software videos for one of the leaders in the digital experience market. Without sharing the results in advance, his data validates what we learned, especially the time and cost it takes to produce software videos in the SaaS world.
Earlier this month we launched a comprehensive survey with SaaS companies about software videos. While we are still compiling the final results, here are some important takeaways from our preliminary analysis.
When most people think of the democratization of video, YouTube comes to mind. YouTube made sharing videos fast, easy, and free. Then smartphones arrived and suddenly you had an “always available” video creation and editing tool in your hands. The process from video creation to video sharing was democratized for consumers. But not for enterprises. For over 20 years, video creation has been a highly centralized process for B2B software, where a few people with highly specialized tools make all the videos for customer enablement, support, and education. Isn’t it time for a change?
If you complete the survey at the end of this post, Videate will make a donation to the American Cancer Society Relay for Life.
There is a famous story about Steve Jobs on why he didn’t ask customers before they designed the iPhone if they wanted one and it goes like this.
One of the challenges of making software videos is having an environment that is always ready for the next video. Whether you record them yourself, hire a third-party to record them for you, or use Videate to automatically generate your videos from documentation, you need a plan to get the “state” of the video recording environment prepared for the next video. Like the seven principles of “Leave-no-trace” camping, here are five principles you should follow to ensure your software videos are beautiful and not cluttered with redundant data or broken by prior recordings.
As we have said many times, the “space race” for text to speech (TTS) technology keeps accelerating. One of the primary advancements is the introduction of neural voices, which has replaced the original generation of voices that many people felt were too robotic for sophisticated voice applications. The original voice technology was based on concatenative synthesis (where you string together the phonemes of the words), which was limited in handling variations in speech based on context. A new generation of neural text to speech (NTTS) voices use deep learning to produce more natural and human-like voices.
Earlier this month, Videate joined the Content Advantage talk show with Scott Abel and Megan Gilhooly, hosted by Zoomin. During the live session, we demonstrated a video tutorial of the Zoomin Analytics platform that was created using Videate’s automated tool that develops video directly from software documentation. Several people in the audience asked us to follow up and explain how we did it, so this week we will walk through the process.