Producing Movies

Once you have captured your movie, either by the recorder (real-time) or Snag-It (slide show), you will want to run it though the producer. Here you can add/edit sound, produce the movie in a number of different formats (e.g. AVI, MOV (Quicktime), rm (Real Player), swf (flash)).

During the production process you will be able to adjust some of the audio and video compression properties. 

Adding Sound

Whether you did a slide show using Snag-it or real-time using the Camtasia Recorder, you may want to eventually add/edit sound to your presentation.  If you added narration while recording realtime, you can skip to the producing stage.

Step 1. Open Producer and click on the Launch Audio Editor button

Step 2. If you have already captured the video or image, select to open it; otherwise select create new.

Step 3.  Here is where your good preparation will help. Navigate to the folder where your videos/images are. You want to come up with a labeling system that will allow you to quickly find the files. You don’t want this to be tedious.

4. This opens the image/video in an audio editor.

5. Hit the red button and you can record. Hit stop when done.

6. I recommend saving these to  separate folder—something to let you know that these are the files with sound (not being terribly creative, I called mine “WithSound”).

Producing

Step 1. Once you have done the capturing and the sound editing, you’re ready to produce the movie. Open the folder on the left side of the Camtasia program that has your movies with sound. You may need to hit F5 or restart Camtasia to see your newly created AVI files.  The pictures look exactly the same except for the AVI extension.  Note:  If you produced real-time and you want to add call outs, arrows or other annotation to your movie, I recommend doing this before you produce it using Camtasia Effects.  I will demo this in the class and will have a video demo online.

Step 2.  You can double-click the picture and it will show up in the preview pane. Here you can listen to the audio once more to ensure it is ready for production. 

Step 3.  Now we are ready to add the pictures to the  storyboard.  There are 3 ways to do this:

1.      You can drag each one individually.

2.      You can select all of the pictures by shift-clicking and drag them all at once.

3.      You can select all the pictures and right-click and select “Add to Storyboard.”

I usually do it the 3^rd way.

Step 4.  All of your pictures should now be on the storyboard.  If you have them labeled strategically[1], they should all be in order.  Now we are ready to produce.  Here we have several options.  I will only cover the basics in this lesson. 

Step 5.  With all of the movies selected, you can add a transition effect by clicking the transition button.  This makes the file size slightly larger, so I usually don’t do this.

Step 6.  Click the produce button.

Step 7.  In the dialog box you have several options.  Here is where you determine the type of movie format you want.  I included a breakdown[2] of the formats here.

File Type	File Extension	Distribution	Strengths	Weaknesses
Audio Video Interleave	AVI	CD-ROM, network directory or downloaded from a web site.	Common and easy to view. Editable and easily converted into other movie formats. A great vendor-neutral format for your stock footage or for distribution on CD-ROM.	Files can be large. Entire file must load to a person's computer before loading. Audio compression not as good as with streaming formats. TSCC-encoded AVI requires TSCC video codec for playback. The TSCC is now built into the Camtasia Player.
Macromedia Flash	SWF	Embed in web page.	Plays in most browsers with no additional software required. Cross platform.	Requires Macromedia Flash PlugIn which is normally installed by default.
GIF Animation File	GIF	Embed in any web page. Plays in any browser.	Supported by nearly all web browsers. Tend to be smaller than other animation files. Animated GIF files are commonly used on web pages. Due to their small size, they are ideal for web delivery, where the exacting detail of an AVI file is not necessary. Animated GIF files are highly condensed.	Video only. Limited to 256 colors. Less range and flexibility.
File Type	File Extension	Distribution	Strengths	Weaknesses
Camtasia for RealPlayer (RealPlayer PlugIn)	CAMV	Streamed from web site.	Lossless video compression and lossless streaming video. Stream files over low bandwidth.	Difficult to send as an e-mail attachment, since audio and video are joined via a SMIL file. Requires a streaming server.
RealMedia Streaming Media	RM	Streamed from web site.	Small file size media. It is not downloaded to the computer. Plays in RealPlayer and browser with PlugIn. Great audio compression.	Requires streaming server to stream from a web site. Lossy video compression. Limited editing options. Cannot be converted to another format.
QuickTime	MOV	Streamed from web site or attached to e-mail.	Wide selection of video and audio compressors. Will play while downloading. Multi-platform, industry-standard, multimedia software architecture.	Viewing may appear "jerky" if download is slow. Entire file will download to the viewer's computer.
Windows Media	(WMV - Streaming Format)	Streamed from web site or attached to e-mail.	Small file size media. It is not downloaded to the computer. Plays in recent Microsoft Windows Media Player and browser.	Requires streaming server for Internet access to stream from a web site. Limited editing options. Cannot be converted to another format.
Pack and Show	EXE	E-mail or embed in a web page.	Makes movies easily accessible to your viewers. Converts Camtasia video into an executable file (EXE) so users can install Camtasia Player to view videos. Retains high resolution and quality. No special software required.	Cannot embed the movies. Runs on PC only (not Mac)

You will want to keep your target audience in mind when selecting the appropriate file type. I generally produce them in 2-3 different formats (Pack and Show, Flash, QuickTime). If you have a streaming sever (Windows Media or Real Player) you will want to consider these options. This allows playback on computers connected via phone modem better.

Step 8.  Let’s produce one as an AVI.  Select AVI from the pull-down menu. Browse to the folder where you want the movie saved.

You will probably want to make some adjustments by click the Options key.

Under the options you can make adjustments in Audio and Video set up as well as changing the size or adding a watermark.  Once completed, click on the Produce button.

Production time will depending on the speed of your computer and the length of the video. Once produced a summary of the production results will appear.  You may want to select and save it as a text file for future reference.  Note the file size is less than 2MBs.  The raw footage was over 4.5 MBs.  File compression cut it about 58%.

Here is a Flash file of the same movie. This seems to be the smallest file size. 

Here is a summary of the rest of the fie types and the size.  You must also consider the types of computer and the software on the computers.

[1] It is a good idea to label your captures in such a way as to be in some sort of sequential order.  I have labeled mine of the form Ch4_4prob1Shot01.  This is problem 1 shot 1 from section 4.4.  It is important to have the 01 after shot rather than just a “1.”  If you have just a 1, and you have more than 9 shots, the 10^th one will be before the 2^nd one.

[2] This breakdown was obtained from:  http://www.techsmith.com/products/studio/tutorials/worksheet5.asp

[3] Even though this file size is not that small, when a streaming server is used, the file isn’t exactly downloaded.  Packets of information are sent to the computer.  In essence you could have a 25MB file viewed as easily as a 2MB file. 

[4] Comes with its own player and codec.

[5] This is under File.  Select the AVI file you created and follow the instructions.  This is perhaps the easiest way to distribute your movies.  See the file types chart above for advantages and disadvantages of the different file types