Tutorial: Producing Screencams in Camtasia Studio

An agenda such as this one does many things, all of them positive. It helps the viewer understand the presentation’s organization, which helps frame the content itself and make it more comprehensible. It helps retain the viewer’s interest by letting him or her know that important sections are coming. It breaks a 9-minute video into five more easily digestible chunks. And during the video, it lets the viewer know that the presentation is moving along and will, in fact, end sometime soon.

Of course, if you insert an agenda into the video, you’ll need to make other creative decisions such as font and background selection. You should always run these by the client beforehand, since they are critical design elements that the client will likely want to be consistent with other marketing collateral.

Getting Ready
You’ve finalized and recorded your script, and now you’re ready to capture your video. Let’s discuss some issues you should consider before pressing the big record button.

First is the screen resolution of your capture station. In most instances, it’s simplest if you configure your screen at the same resolution you’ll be capturing, which ensures that all dialog boxes will open within the capture window.

For example, suppose you capture a 1024x768 application within a 2560x1600 window, like the one I use on my wonderful HP LP3065 30" LCD panel. I find this approach more convenient than full-screen capture because it leaves plenty of room on the desktop for other stuff, such as file administration and playback, not to mention checking email or the latest baseball scores. However, some programs (such as Premiere Pro) will open dialog windows outside the application window if there’s screen space to spare.

When this occurs, you can change your screen resolution to the target capture resolution, which forces Premiere Pro to open all windows inward within the capture window. Or, you could move the application and capture window to the extreme right edge of the desktop to force Premiere Pro to open the window within the capture area. Similarly, if the application extends a window below the application window, you can move the application and capture area to the bottom of the desktop.

The second consideration is to prepare your desktop for capture. In the past, this meant reducing color from 24-bit to 8-bit display, but in most instances this is no longer necessary. However, if the desktop will show at any point during the presentation, you should make it as simple as possible, deleting as many icons as possible and returning to a basic one-color scheme. That’s because at some point in the future, you may have to recapture some section of the video, and having a simple background makes it easy to duplicate.

Finally, close all programs that aren’t essential to your screencam, again for visual simplicity. Nothing’s worse than reshooting your video, adding it into Premiere Pro, and then noticing that the new video doesn’t match the old because you had Internet Explorer open the first time but not the second.

Develop Good Capture Habits
When it’s time to actually start capturing, consider the goals of the video presentation. First, you want to make it look like you captured it in one smooth capture session, even if it took four, five, or, more likely, 20 or 30. Second, you want all movements to be steady and sure, as if you knew exactly what you were doing each step of the way.

To accomplish these goals, you have to develop and use good capture habits. The toughest for me was to keep the mouse still until I knew my next destination. For example, suppose I was demonstrating how to use the Word Count function in Microsoft Word. I know it’s somewhere off the Tools menu, but don’t specifically remember which item it is.