Andrew Brown’s Captivate series introduced me to a number of facilities in the program which I hadn’t fully appreciated. However, there are times when still images aren’t good enough for training purposes, such as when you want to illustrate a video editing process. With this in mind I’ve been playing with Techsmith’s Camtasia Studio 5, a screen recorder with facilities for adding narration, callouts, transition effects, etc and exporting in a variety of formats. The academic licence costs about £84.

I don’t intend making this a review of all the features. Techsmith has a good introductory video and there are many reviews online. I want to focus on using it.

I decided to create a short video about blogs as recently I’d been giving brief introductions to various Web 2.0 topics to probationers and I’d use some of the materials. Camtasia is very easy to use. Just decide which area of the screen you want to recorded and click a button. When you’ve finished, click to stop. So far so good, but when clicking between sites, there are an inevitable delays so these had to be edited out. Then there were the times when I’d clicked the wrong link or hesitated too long and these had to go. Finally, I wanted to reduce the finished movie to under 5 minutes because I hoped to put together a series of short movies under the banner ‘Give Me Five’. Editing in Camtasia is intuitive so this didn’t take long.

I decided to avoid doing anything fancy to the video but couldn’t resist the pan and zoom feature which lets you zoom to the part of the screen you want to focus on. This can be set to work automatically but I found it easier to create my own.

Now, I thought, the easy bit. All I have to do is to add some narration and it’s finished. Tachsmith has a number of features to make adding a narration easy such as the ability to freeze a frame if your narration is over-running. About 90 minutes later, the 5 minute narration was finished. Not perfect, not even good, but finished. At this point my admiration for AB’s relaxed clarity multiplied! I’d chosen to work without a script - big mistake. You can fluff your way through when giving a live presentation but not when it’s being recorded. When I’d arrived at the end of the 5 minutes with some remaining semblance of coherence, I exported the file to Audacity and cut out as many ‘ers’ and ‘ums’ as I could without reducing the length too much.

So- lessons learned:

• Plan the video and voice-over before you go near the computer.
• Don’t record your voice when you have a cold.

Is Camtasia Studio 5 worth getting? If you want to make short training videos, this is a great piece of software. It shares some features with Adobe Captivate but each has its own strengths. Both programs have 30 day trials so you can download and try before you buy.

Here is the result of my initial efforts. It can only get better!

 (I’ve just noticed that this video has extra minutes of nothing added on to the end. Sorry - it does  last less than 5 minutes - honest!)