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MillimeterEdit Expertise: Screencam Production
Aug 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer
TechSmith Camtasia Studio features one-source recording, editing, and encoding capabilities.
TechSmith Camtasia Studio provides a fast, easy, and professional way to record, produce, and distribute screencam-based video for the Windows environment.
If you produce video, there's a good chance that at some point someone will ask you to create a screencam-based video to demonstrate the operation of a software program. If you use Windows, the go-to program is TechSmith Camtasia Studio — now up to version 5.1. It offers the most extensive blend of recording, editing, and output features of any screencam production program.
In this part how-to, part review, I'll walk you through the steps of creating a screencam project with Camtasia Studio. (Watch my tutorial online at digitalcontentproducer.com/videos/dcptv.) Along the way, I'll identify the key capabilities in the current release of 5.1, which include some strong new editing capabilities and some valuable distribution options.
Let's start with some of the preliminaries. Camtasia Studio costs $299. It includes multiple modules for recording, editing, rendering, building menus, editing audio, and distributing your screencasts. TechSmith offers a fully functional 30-day trial version and, as you would expect, extensive screencam-based help files on its website.
Figure 1: The opening screen makes it easy to get started on your project, including recording PowerPoint presentations.
When you run Camtasia Studio for the first time, you'll see a welcome screen (Figure 1). This screen offers four ways to start a project, including recording a PowerPoint presentation. In this role, Camtasia functions as a PowerPoint plug-in, recording your narration as well as slides, animations, transitions, and other screen activity. Because you can record while you're actually producing a live presentation, it's a great way to record once and distribute many times; but that's outside the scope of this article, so I won't discuss this function further.
Recording
To record a traditional screencam, click the New Screen Recording button, which opens the Camtasia Recorder (Figure 2). The fundamental decision you have to make is the resolution of the screen area that you'll actually record. This will differ depending upon the program's interface and the functions you're attempting to demonstrate, but my rule of thumb is to capture the smallest resolution within which you can demonstrate the program's functions without feeling cramped. For example, with Sorenson Media Squeeze — the program I used for demonstration purposes — I could have got away with 800x600, but I used 1024×768 because the smaller resolution felt cramped.
Figure 2. The Camtasia recorder.
Don't worry; you're not locking yourself into a distribution resolution; rather, you're just trying to capture the optimal video to later edit to your target resolution. As you'll see, I'll produce the final video at 640×480 resolution, despite capturing at 1024×768.
Once you've made this decision, click the Select Area to Record button. Then, either drag the cursor over the target region or, to capture an entire program, click the top bar of the application and Camtasia will select the entire application.
When you're manually dragging the capture window, you can, of course, set the desired resolution. When capturing an entire program, after clicking the top bar, either select the target resolution from the preset sizes list box or enter it manually in the width and height boxes. Then, check Lock to Application, which will resize the application window to the target resolution — a nice convenience added in version 5.
Checking the Lock to Application box is also supposed to ensure that all windows opened within the program while you're recording open within the confines of the capture resolution. For example, Squeeze's preset configuration window can be quite large; it often exceeds the height or width of the application itself, or it opens outside the confines of the program. Without this function, you would have to manually drag the wayward window back into the recording area, which looks sloppy. Camtasia somehow forces the preset window to open within the recording window, which is nice. When I first looked at version 5, this function didn't work universally, but it appears to be much improved in version 5.1.
Figure 3. Selecting your final recording options.
Other capture options include adding a click noise for mouse clicks or typing sounds for text entry and highlighting your cursor with a red or yellow circle. I use the defaults for these (no noises, no highlights), and I typically accept all other capture defaults for recording format and frame rate.
You can narrate while recording, and Camtasia will capture and synchronize both streams — which is the approach I usually use for casual presentations such as this one. (I admit the audio isn't my best work, but it'll do for demo purposes.) Or you can narrate and capture separately, and then merge the two streams in Camtasia Studio. I use this latter approach for client work or when I want really polished results, because usually I can narrate more effectively when I can focus on just one task at a time.
One more detail before you get started: As a default, the F9 key pauses recording and F10 restarts it. Another great feature in version 5 is that if you pause recording with the function key (as opposed to using the recording controls that open while you're recording), Camtasia will restore the mouse to its pre-pause location when you press F10 to restart recording. This is incredibly valuable; a mouse jump from one spot onscreen to another is an obvious glitch. Therefore, if you need to pause because the phone rings, the delivery person knocks, or your kids come screaming in, remember to use F9.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
