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Sound and Camtasia - record sound and screen - record separately
My most recent tutorial (Google Scholar) required me to record a section at home without my trusty headset, so I muted the machine microphone and recorded it as silent. At work, I recorded the second part but because the first was silent I recorded it silent as well. Then I needed to add various images.. long story short, the whole thing had no sound.
Which was a blessing because I now think that it is better to record your tutorial with no sound, then add voice narration after.
Thinking back, I realize that when recording screen and audio, my attention is split between navigating screens and talking coherently. If you mute your headset, you can talk as you go through screens which gives you an idea of how long to stay on a screen, when to move on etc.
You can then add callouts, do your zooms, get it ready to go.
Then you can write a narration script or just practice if it is short enough and record your narration. Then, when you start voice narration, youn only have to focus on commenting on the video as it plays. If you get stumblemouth, you only have to erase the audio and try again, no need to re-record your screens.
I wish I had thought of this long ago.
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SWF file size on Screencast.com
I have noticed that my Camtasia productions have been getting larger, the last one is 84MB for 3.30 min. This can be slow for a user to run depending on their broadband capacity. Using the video editing tools in Camtasia such as zooms and callouts adds to the recorded size of the .avi.
There are two solutions:
1 - make the tutorials plain vanilla so that a swf will be small. This seems to defeat the purpose of developing rich content.
2. - Use swf for downloading and alternate versions for delivery. There is another thread that discusses how to use embed code and have screencast.com serve the tutorial, that still requires good bandwidth to deliver a 84MB swf file.
The alternate is for a site to download all 3 files from DSpace, then edit the Camtasia file themselves. Once you have the 3 files in a folder, you can produce the tutorial to a .flv which will be much smaller. You will need to serve the files from a server that handles swfs. The much smaller flv is contained in two wrappers, a HTML file and a swf wrapper that provides captioning, live links, quizzes, anything interactive that you want to add.
Remember that the Creative Commons license lets you modify the source files, i.e. the camrec and camproj.
Posted:
Jun 17 2008, 12:51 PM EDT by
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Collaborative tutorials - part 2
How can you collaborate on a tutorial?
You can be a content expert or you can be the one with the software license.
When you are considering doing an animated tutorial, the project may seem daunting when you think of everything you need to do.
Get an idea, write a script, then record it and do the editing. Even if you are pretty good with Captivate or Camtasia or Viewlet builder, the front end takes work. The planning is just as important as the recording, even more so.
I saw in this wiki that Bill Badke had committed to do a tutorial on Research questions. I had no pressing project and am on Professional Development so can try new things. I proposed that we work together on this one.
So, we split the work.
Bill knows a lot about information literacy, I have developed my skills on Camtasia. We live 80 km apart so needed a virtual workspace.
He wrote the script in his space on PBwiki and invited me as an editor. You can see the script at
http://badke.pbwiki.com/Research-Questions
After an unrecorded run through, I added a few sentences in places where I thought I needed more narration to cover the length of time that a slide needed to be on the screen.
Slides and Camtasia were a new thing for me. I have used Camtasia as a way to capture a flow of changing computer screens. This project needed something else, so I created the visual part of the script in powerpoint, then recorded the narration as I clicked through the powerpoint show.
If you are working with faculty and they can create content in powerpoint, that is probably an easier learning curve for them than working out a script for an internet search project. You can add the voice and do the production and uploading.
The final product is at DSpace:
http://hdl.handle.net/1880/46628
From my initial proposal to the completed project was about 6 or 7 days, so you can execute your ideas very quickly.
Richard
Posted:
Jun 9 2008, 7:37 PM EDT by
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Scripts and content specialists
I have realized that knowing how to produce a tutorial in Camtasia does not mean that I have to do it alone.
Just like in the real movies, there are functions that can someone else can do.
One of our librarians was between projects and on a quiet reference desk.
I asked her to write a script for the Sage Criminology tutorial.
She made a great script in a 3 column table. Narration in the left, mouse action in the centre and callouts in the right.
I put it through a dry run, testing my cadence and how the narration matched the mouse movements. I added some narration, deleted a bit, then recorded and produced in about 4 hours total.
So if you are a subject ace and someone at your library can produce in Camtasia, team work will even out the workload and produce a better tutorial.
Richard
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Best Practices in Screencasting
This site provides individuals with information about how to design tutorials effectively, information on how to measure the effectiveness of tutorials, as well as some information on screencasting and video sites. These initial postings are the resu
Last updated:
Oct 11 2011, 11:56 AM EDT by
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