How I make screencasts: Lecture capture, part 2

Now that school’s out, I’m going to pick up where I left off (two months ago!) in my series on how I make screencasts. So far I’ve made three posts in this series. In the first post we talked about what a screencast is, exactly, and why anybody would want to make one. In the second post, we saw how the elements of careful planning make screencasting a successful experience. And in the most recent post, we took a look at using Keynote (or PowerPoint) to create a lecture-capture screencast.

Before I talk about the other kinds of screencasts I make, I’m going to take this post to describe how I use my go-to tool for screencasting: Camtasia for Mac, specifically how I use it to make lecture capture videos when I’m not using Keynote. (Full disclosure: I was on the beta-testing team for Camtasia for Mac and got a free license for the software for my efforts. But I can definitely say that I’d gladly have paid the $99 for the software otherwise — it’s that useful.) There is a Windows version of Camtasia and a server-oriented variant called Camtasia Relay, and they are all very similar, so what I describe in this post can be used if lots of different situations.

Let’s suppose I have a lecture or presentation that I want to turn into a screencast, which basically means I need to record the presentation as it happens on the screen and add a voice-over. I’ve already described how to do this with Keynote or PowerPoint, but what if you’re using Prezi, Beamer, or some other presentation tool? What I need is a tool that will record stuff happening on the screen that’s separate from the presentation tool itself. That’s where Camtasia comes in.

Camtasia is software that records video of anything happening on your screen — all of it, or part of it — along with any audio you choose to add, including voiceovers. You can record multiple segments of video, edit those segments, and put it all together with transitions and effects. The interface is laid out a lot like iMovie, so Mac users will feel right at home using it.

There are a lot — seriously, a lot — of options for working with video in Camtasia, too many to get into here. I’ll just show an example of a simple lecture capture putting Prezi and Camtasia together.

First, bring up the screen that has the Prezi in it. (For Prezis particularly, creating the lecture capture works best if you download the Prezi to your local drive and then run it in a window, rather than trying to run it on the web.)

Now launch Camtasia. When you do, a little floating pane will come up that looks like this:

The dropdown menu on the left lets you specify which part of the screen you’re going to capture. I usually just select “YouTube HD/720p”, which records essentially the entire screen. I can crop out what I don’t need later. And once I put it on YouTube (which is my usual destination for screencasts) it’ll be in glorious 720p HD.

Once you’ve selected your area, just click the Record button and start presenting, just as you would if you were giving the lecture in front of a live audience. Your lecture is being recorded behind the scenes and all you see is your screen. Warning: Presenting for a screencast feels a lot different than doing it for a live audience because, well, the audience isn’t there. There’s no body language or ambience to add to the presentation. So this will feel a little unusual at first. Also, I can’t stress enough that you should probably go from a prepared script the first few times you do this, rather than try to wing it. It’ll keep you on track and prevent lots of mistakes.

When you stop recording, you’re brought into the main editing area of Camtasia:

The bottom part of this screen is called the “timeline”. Right now, the one clip that I have in the timeline is a partial video of the presentation. It appears as a chunk of the timeline outlined in blue. Inside the timeline you can see the audio levels given as waveforms, and there’s a playhead along the top of the timeline showing you where you are in the video as well as the time.

At this point, what I usually do is check the sound levels first. A lot of times the built-in microphone on my Macbook doesn’t record very loudly. I’ll listen to a bit of the recorded video to check if that is the case. If so, I go and apply the Dynamics Processor effect to the clip I made:

You apply the clip just by dragging it from the effects area directly onto the clip in the timeline. In fact this is how all the effects, transitions, and other features of Camtasia are applied to video. The Dynamics Processor brings all audio levels up to a uniformly audible setting.

If I have the time, I will watch the whole video from start to finish to see if I’m happy with it. If there’s something I need to edit out — I goofed the script, or sneezed, or the phone rang, etc. — I can go back and edit that part out just by putting the playhead just before the mistake:

Then selecting “Split selected at playhead” from the Edit menu; this splits the video clip in two, right where the blooper is. Then move the playhead until just after the mistake, and selecting “Trim Start to Playhead”. This will crop out the blooper from the second clip. Then you can just drag the second clip over next to the first one, and with that, the blooper is edited out.

The ability to edit in such an easy way really changed screencasting for me. You will make mistakes when you screencast, no matter how good or experienced you get. But you don’t want to have to throw away an entire screencast because of one goof. If I am screencasting and I make a mistake, I just pause for a moment, and then I start again from the point of error. The pause will show up on the audio as a flat spot, and I can go back and edit the error out. You cannot do this with the voiceover features of Keynote and PowerPoint, and it makes a huge difference.

If this is just a straight lecture capture — so there’s no other video coming in from a different source — at this point I’m done. The only thing left to do is add the “credits page” that I always put at the end of my screencasts that lists my email, YouTube channel, Twitter, and so on. I have this saved as a PDF. To bring it into the timeline, I go to Import Media:

and select it from the file finder. It then appears as a clip:

I just drag it into the timeline at the end of the video:

And then, for effect, add a fade-in transition from the video to the credits, which I do by finding it in the transitions menu:

And dragging and dropping it in the little seam between the video clip and the credits page:

Now I’m ready to publish. Camtasia allows me to publish the resulting video directly to my YouTube channel using the Share menu:

As you can see, there are options for iTunes and Screencast.com as well. Or you can just choose “Export…” which exports the video to a file format of your choice, for uploading wherever you want.

After I start the process, Camtasia converts the video to Quicktime and then uploads it with the title I gave it. A 10-minute video will take several minutes to complete this process on a Macbook Pro. Your mileage will vary according to your system hardware and your internet connection. After it’s done uploading, I still have to go to YouTube and add metadata. But otherwise that’s it!

What’s nice about Camtasia is that the tool is separate from the presentation tool you’re using. So if you already have the presentation content made up, you can turn it into a screencast quite easily. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Prezi, Beamer, a text document you’re scrolling down, or anything else. And the more you do this, the easier it gets to convert existing presentation content into a mobile device-friendly screencast.

In the next post, I’ll talk about what I call “whiteboard” screencasts, where I record stuff that I am writing on the screen. This is a lot like what Salman Khan at Khan Academy does. Hopefully it won’t be another two months before I get to that.

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How I make screencasts: Lecture capture, part 1

Image via Wikipedia

Sorry for the time in between posts lately. It’s been an odd mix of attending conferences, getting ready to attend conferences, and spending time in the hospital being treated for skin infections picked up at those conferences for the last couple of weeks. Long story. Let’s talk about something more pleasant than cellulitis, namely screencasting.

So far I’ve posted about the general idea of screencasting and what I do with screencasts, and I’ve posted about the all-important planning phase of screencasating. Now I’m ready to start getting to the nuts and bolts. Of the three kinds of screencasts I do, probably the simplest is the lecture capture. In a lecture capture I am simply recording a slide presentation or a Prezi with a voiceover. Here’s an example, which is an overview of the first test being given to a freshman calculus class:

All this screencast is, is a Keynote slide deck that I prepared with a voiceover. Sometimes this is all you need for the task you want to accomplish. For those non-Mac people out there, Keynote is Apple’s version of PowerPoint — a presentation software tool that comes with the iWork office suite. If you have a Mac and don’t use iWork, it’s well worth looking into. Many people find Keynote to be much better designed and easier to use than PowerPoint or any of the other presentation tools out there.

The basic gist behind a lecture capture is that you are just using a presentation tool to give a normal presentation, and capturing the audio and the video that goes with it. This does not include any sort of writing on the board; I’ll deal with that in the next post in this series on “whiteboard” screencasts. But everyone should note well that the lecture capture approach is often part of my screencasts but rarely the entire thing. Many of my MATLAB screencasts are set up by brief, 1- to 2-minute long lecture captures before cutting away to a live screencast straight out of MATLAB. So even if lecture capture doesn’t sound like your thing, it’s worth thinking about.

With Keynote, doing a lecture capture screencasts is very easy. After planning it out, you just make the slide deck exactly as you would if you were to present it live. Then, instead of clicking the “Play” button to do the slideshow, click on Play > Record Slideshow:

This put the slideshow into presentation mode on your screen but also record audio from the microphone at the same time. From here, you just go through your slideshow as you would normally, and whatever goes into the mic gets recorded. When you’re done recording, go to Share > Export…:

There’s an option on the screen that comes up next to export to Quicktime, and that’s what to select. (I use the default video/audio options; you can tweak these.) And presto — you have a nice, high-quality Quicktime movie of your lecture that’s suitable for sharing online or burning to a disc.

PowerPoint (at least the version I have, which is PowerPoint 2008 for the Mac) has all of these capabilities as well. In PowerPoint, you would make up your slide deck as usual and then go to Slide Show > Record Narration…:

What happens next is a bit different from Keynote. PowerPoint does what it says: It attaches an audio narration to each slide as you click through it in presentation mode. There is the option — but not a requirement — to record the timing of the slide transitions as well. In Keynote, the transitions are automatically timed. To turn this voiceover-plus-presentation into a movie, just go to File > Save as Movie… and there are plenty of options to choose from.

I should mention that as for a microphone, I just use the built-in microphone on my Macbook Pro. I have used a USB headset microphone before and I think it did improve the audio quality noticeably, but to be honest with you: I’m really cheap. If I can get good audio quality that nobody complains about using the built-in mic, why spend $50 to get very good audio quality with a USB mic? One of these days I’ll break down and buy one, I’m sure. Until then I pinch my pennies.

There are a couple of issues to think about at this point regarding lecture captures.

• What if you want to use some other presentation tool besides Keynote or PowerPoint, for example the Beamer package for , or Prezi?
• What if you wanted to record portions of a lecture at a time and stitch them all together later, or conversely what if you wanted/needed to edit out or enhance portions of a lecture capture you created with Keynote or PowerPoint?

For those kinds of tasks, I would turn to my #1, go-to tool for almost all my screencasting needs: Camtasia for Mac. Camtasia is an all-purpose video and screencasting tool that does an outstanding job with just about anything I could possibly want to do with a basic screencast. There’s so much to Camtasia, and we are going to need to refer to it so much in later posts about whiteboard and demo screencasts, that I’m going to deal with Camtasia (and its alternatives) in a separate post.

Meanwhile, if you have other tricks and tips about lecture capture screencasting, please share in the comments.