Quick Tip: How I Personally Create Screencasts with Camtasia

Hope fully this will spur more screencasts in the Tuts+ marketplace.
Jeffrey what about your export setting, on the pc version there are tons of options
things like flv or quicktime, frame rate, colors and jpeg compression, as you probably know these settings make the difference between good and bad quality and small file size or massive 100mb 5 minute screencasts
Another tip is try not to use too many images as the more colors you capture the larger screencast file size

In case you dont want to spend $100 on screencasting software, you can use camstudio for pc, and there are a bunch of screencasting options for linux that will run under x11 in OSX. These both obviously take some setup, but they work perfectly as well, and more importantly, they’re free.

Marvelous info…great..

Thanks for sharing..

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I recently used Camtasia to produce a screencast for a software tutorial DVD — about an hour’s worth of footage! It really is a pretty good program. There are a few quirks I ran into during this long laborious process. Due to the size of the project, I recorded it in pieces. I also recorded the audio separately from the screen cast because I didn’t want to talk and do the actions at the same time, because of stuttering, coughing, etc. Doing the audio separately lets you edit that sort of thing out later, or do several takes of a piece of dialogue and use the best one. The problem I ran into was that when you import an audio file into Camtasia, it will only be able to use files up to a certain quality. I forget what the actual parameter was, but it was like 16kbps or something. Whatever it was, my audio was recorded at 32. Importing those files resulted in pretty much an empty audio clip. The wave form was flat. I had to go back and resave each of the clips (an hour’s worth of audio, nearly 200 files) in the lower quality.

Another thing with the Camtasia projects, is that they are very dependent on the locations of your asset files. The location of every asset you use in the project is relative to the file system, not the project file. What I mean is, if you have your project in C:\Users\Bob’s Desktop PC\My Screencast and move it to another computer, to C:\Users\Bob’s Laptop\My Screencast, when you open the project it’s going to ask you for the locations of your assets because it’s still looking for Bob’s Desktop PC. And I found that even if you point to the correct locations it can have weird effects on your project. The correct way to transfer a project from one location to another is to go into Camtasia and export the project as a zip.

Does anyone know what the 1P is next to his web address bar? I’ve seen that a lot of times and always wondered what it is.

Thanks for the tips Jeffrey! I always wondered your steps. I have ScreenFlow, but still have yet to create a screencast…one day soon though!

Jeffery,

Better question how did you force the youtube embed to be 720 at a non traditional size. every since they changes the embeds style I haven’t been able to force 720 at custom sizes.

Then off topic is there a post on setting up and running a testing web host on osx snow leopard that would mimic my serverbeach server.

Thanks for the help folks

Doc