It's an age old debate within the IT industry, or tech public speaking community, should your demos within presentations be live or recorded?
I'm personally on the side of recording demos and using them, as it gives you the ability to focus on the narrative rather than button pressing/typing commands etc. In the virtual world that we are living in, using videos to demo something in say Microsoft Azure means my Internet connection isn't having to deal with presenting my video/audio/screen AND work in the cloud.
However, as I said it's something that there is a lot of debate around, and I'd love to hear your thoughts!
Top comments (2)
Our team switched to recordings for sprint reviews quite some time ago and we're pretty convinced so far. Reasons are, that it makes the review more predictable and flexible and less error prone. Slow loading times don't interrupt the flow, the presenter can pause and continue or show again without much effort. When the videos and a short script on what happens when are attached to the ticket, anyone can present it, they only need to watch the video and read the script first. The stakeholders are usually interested in seeing it somehow. They don't care if it was prerecorded, as long as they can reproduce it themselves.
One downside to that, though, is the increased overhead. You probably need a few takes, whereas with presenting stuff live, you can do it once and you're done. But then again, it forces you to really think your presentation through and pay attention to details.
Thanks for sharing. You are right in that the recording adds in a lot of overhead but I've started to reuse the demos I create for presentations and put them on YouTube with an appropriate context/voiceover to help make that extra time spend creating them worth while. 👍