Camtasia screen capture

As we progress through getting the We-Town site to work, we’ve realized that mad amounts of directions are needed in order for people to understand how to do even the most basic things. I think it mainly the fault of the software manufacturer for the confusion, but at least there’s a way around it: writing directions. However, Professor Webb decided to have us take a slightly different route: we’re going to create a sort of “movie” using a screen capture program that will guide users through utilizing different aspects of the site. But before we can do that, it’s necessary to determine what program is good. A Mac one would be preferable because we have four soundproof recording studios for interruption-free audio recording. But Dr. Webb only knows of good screen capture programs available for PC; in fact, the one the school already has is for PC.

So this week’s blog assignment is to download a screen capture program and make a sample with it. I was assigned Camtasia, a PC-based program, which works out well for me because I’ve got a really boss PC. You can download a free trial from their website. This works out well for us because we only need the program for a short period of time. However, if our experiment proves positive, then it’s possible the school will purchase one of the four programs we’re trying (key word is “possible”).

The program was really easy to use. After a short download, I loaded it and was informed that features have changed since the last version and that I should watch a video on how to use the new version (probably made with Camtasia). I opted not to watch the video; I wanted to see how hard it would be to figure it out on my own. And it was simple. After selecting the area I wanted to record, the small window relocated to the lower right corner, and then let me record. When it started recording, it told me how to pause and stop recording via a small balloon. In mere seconds, I had a screen capture of how to log into G-mail. I saved the video, and it gave me a new window with options for making the video sharable (I don’t care if that’s not a word; it is now). And with little more input from myself, I had a video in Flash format that I can now share on the web (the way I chose to save the video). However, before doing this, the video is in a proprietary format that can only be access through Camtasia software, but it’s easy to convert it into a multitude of different file formats.

The video couldn’t have lasted even thirty seconds; I didn’t intend to make it long. The resulting Flash file is less than one megabyte in size (678 kilobytes, to be precise), which is handy because it won’t take up a lot of hard drive space, nor will it take ages to download in order to view.

Audio is really easy to add in post-production. There are two help buttons right there to assist the confused user: one takes you to the software in-program help; the other takes you to a website with a video help file. But it’s quite easy to do without the help.

We should definitely use this program. It took me less than five minutes to figure out the program and put together a little screen capture. The audio is easy to do, but I somehow managed to not save my original file (my fault, not the program’s) so I couldn’t actually do it. In fact, I’m pretty sure you could even add audio while creating the video itself. The file sizes seem like they’ll be small (mine was less than a megabyte for a really short video), and the program includes a variety of file types to can produce the video in.