I have toyed around with doing interviews on Skype on some of the sites, and the results have been somewhat less than wonderful.
The interviews themselves were great, and actually got some good traffic in return for the information presented. And doing video interviews is a super method of “borrowing credibility” especially if you are going into a new (for you) niche. It has been a definite boost to the sites on which I have able to post interviews with folks who have bigger names in the business than I do.
“Less-than-wonderful” describes the quality of the video itself. When I go back and watch those interviews, I cringe.
Note that good audio is more important than good video, but it’s best to have good audio and video.
What I was doing was trying to poor-boy it and use a tool that I already had: SnagIt. The results were, well, like I said, less than wonderful. Penny wise, pound foolish.
Screen capture simply isn’t the way to go for recording a Skype video call. That, by the way, includes the high-end screen capture tools like Camtasia (or the free CamStudio).
I finally broke down and got Evaer. Now I’m kicking myself for not having done that to begin with. We are talking TWENTY BUCKS, for crying out loud. Better yet, they offer a free trial version that has everything that the full version has, but is limited to 5 minutes of recording time. When you pay the $20 and register it, the recording time limit is removed. Then the only limit is the amount of disk space you have.
I downloaded the trial, and ran some tests. I was sold. It was an easy setup, and it works “just the way it said on the tin.” I mean, for TWENTY BUCKS I could have skipped all of the awful results of using a screen capture program (which is actually pretty good for its designed use, but not for recording Skype video) to record my interviews.
I did several runs of the trial version, and settled on the side-by-side video. It is slightly awkward that you don’t get to see what the recorded version really looks like, but it’s nice that the recorded version really looks a lot better — and isn’t affected by your moving cursor or resizing the screen.
Evaer works by capturing the raw video and audio signals from both sides. If you want to get really fancy (and have some high-end video editing software), you can specify that you want Evaer to record the audio and video in separate files, and mix them all together in post-processing. I just wanted to pump out an interview, not spend a couple of hours editing, and the side-by-side option gave me exactly what I wanted.
I can kick myself for going through all that agony that I could have avoided FOR TWENTY BUCKS. Sheesh. SnagIt cost more than that.
If you are thinking of doing interviews (and you really should), SPEND THE LOUSY TWENTY BUCKS. You can even test it out for free to make sure it really fits your needs first.
