Top Tips for Creating Screencasts with Camtasia
- Don’t be seduced by post-production. Be disciplined and try and do everything in one take. Trust me this will take less time (both in the long and shot term) than getting sucked into editing. If it doesn’t work in one take, throw it away and start again. This is the only way to learn how to do it better. If you say “I’ll edit this bit out later” you will A. possibly never get around to it and B. never learn to improve your live presentation. Here is a diagram I use in presentations to show the production/editing stage in the workflow:
- Don’t strive for perfection (publish or perish): Get it out there. Get used to the sound of your own voice. Hear your umhs, aws and flaws but don’t get hung up on them.
- Record at a low resolution. Turn your screen resolution down to something like 800 x 600 before you record.
- Avoid pan and zoom. Instead try and stick to a fixed screen area. Zooms and Pans are distracting to the viewer (particularly for program walk-throughs aimed at novices) and more time-consuming to produce. If you are recording the whole screen or even a large portion of it you probably need to get back to basics.
- Don’t aim for ipod/mobile phone. If you are using Camtasia to record a PC application the resultant video will never look right on a mobile device period. The only thing that will look vaguely good on a mobile device is a carefully designed powerpoint slide with large font (and this is missing the point of using a screen-casting program like camtasia) . Put all i-somethings out of your mind unless you have a very very very good reason*
- Batch publish. If you have a few videos, batch produce them to give them all a consistent look and feel. This is a very simple way to brand all your content and give it a professional feel without spending lots of time at it. I love this feature. It works great with a nice customised pre-loader with your logo if you know your way around Flash (or know your way around someone who knowns their way around Flash).
- The ten minute rule: Video is a passive and hypnotic medium if you’re video is longer than ten minutes add some interactivity, even if its just a hotspot to say “click here to prove you are still alive”. Consider cutting your video down to ten minutes altogether making it more modular and resuable
- Publish to Flash. Don’t get me started on how bogey windows media player files are. Flash (swf or flv) is a very mature cross-platform format optimized for web delivery.
- Don’t bother with the freebies. Its almost bad manners now days to expect people to pay for something but Camtasia has so much value for such a low price that you would be mad go banging your head against a wall with wink etc. I’ve already done the whole head and wall thing. Come back in a year when these applications have matured.
What do you think? Any Captivate users out there with similar or divergent experiences?
*very very very - the triveriate closely related to the trirealiate: “trust me, it’s really really really safe”
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I disagree with your opening statement: “If it doesn’t work in one take, throw it away and start again.” In reality, one take should work 100% of the time (assuming the software behaves itself).
I do a bit a eLearning development and script writing. Adobe Captivate is my eLearning development tool of choice. However, the tool you use really doesn’t matter in this case.
If you want to avoid re-recording, you need a tried and true eLearning script. If the script is well written and… this is key… rehearsed prior to recording… you won’t run into unexpected “issues” during the recording phase.
Thanks for the comments Kevin. Maybe I didn’t express myself well because I am mostly in agreement with your points. One take should indeed work. There is no need to be phil spector (although Be My Baby probably required a bit of hard graft editing and many takes) eh where was I?
Scripting and storyboarding - yes indeed I should have included those as essentials.
How do you find Captivate?
Note to Self: Add a facility for commentators to recieve email of any replies to their comments
- Eamon
I agree that none of the freeware tools are mature enough yet to do a proper job. I’ve tried Wink (couldn’t get it working, maybe a Vista thing), and Jing. Jing does seem to be very good for more ‘informal’ and basic screencasts, but you’ll always have the ‘created with jing’ screen at the end. I also gave SnagIt ago (which isn’t free, but relatively cheap), this publishes to .avi, and quality ain’t great. So.. after all my trials, I’m finally gonna give Captivate a go. Thanks for all the tips, I’ll defo be keeping these in mind.
Thanks @karen
I did not know snagit could record the screen and I have been using it all day today! I just use snagit for static image capture which it is great for.
Yeah I hope the free tools get better too. There is a huge market - perhaps something will come out of the linux community
- Eamon
Yeah it’s super for still captures, I like the snazzy drop shadows you can add for making screengrabs a little prettier for inclusion in documentation/elearning. The ‘record screen video’ option is under ‘basic capture profiles’ when you launch SnagIt (you just have to scroll down to see it).
@karen Ah, good to know. best of luck with Captivate.
- Eamon
I have started using Captivate, having previously used an old version of ViewletBuilder. Captivate is pretty straightforward to get the hang of technically (the fully functioning demo has a series on screencast tutorials which are helpful together with a couple of hours playing around with it). I find that a series of short screencasts, each with a specific focus, works best.
Hi @Damien look forward to hearing more. Send us a link if you have any sample content to share. (Not to self: Must put up some samples here myself.)
I agree a series of more screencasts makes sense, more modular, reusable and easier to record.
Good luck with the recording.
- Eamon
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Good Article. While I agree with you that “one take should be enough” it really depends on your audience and your ultimate purpose.
I do a lot of screencasting for my clients, mostly to illustrate custom web applications I made for them, and in that case I just rip it and deliver it.
Now I am trying to produce a podcast/screencast I want to deliver on Itunes adn Youtube (as well as other places) and I want the result to look and sound as professional as possible. I have to go edit it even if I use a screenplay and my recording is almost perfect. “Almost” doesn’t cut it for me.
I also disagree with the pan and zoom statement. I think it has its place, especially when dealing with code and other minute fonts delivered at youtube (let alone Ipod) resolution. I am actually trying to figure out an easy to apply zoom effect (magnifier) where the screen stays there but the area in question pops up. I can do it in Premiere or after effects but not in Camtasia. It would be nice to have it as an option.
I use captivate and believe that movies should be kept short. My reason is that from the learner’s perspective they can only take in a limited amount of information at a time. Short clips give the learner the opportunity to absorb a little at a time, i.e. chunking the information.
Thanks Fionnghuala. I agree. chucking is very important, especially for something like say maths.
[...] will look at some tips I wrote two years ago on this topic and examine their continued relevance. The take-home message of this talk will be [...]