Camtasia

I spent some quality time these last few weeks playing around with Camtasia for class. I used it once before during my internship, but that was under the supervision of a librarian so I didn't have as much time to explore the different tools and functions.

Overall, I really enjoy Camtasia. I think it's a great way to create instructional videos. I tried a couple different techniques to see what would work best for me. Here are my notes on these techniques:

• Record Video and Audio Simultaneously: Disaster!  Do not attempt!  Okay, so maybe it wouldn't be a disaster for everyone.  But inevitably I would stutter on the last page or I would be tapping my finger impatiently waiting for the page to load and the mic would pick that tapping up.  So, not the best technique.
  
• Record Video, Audio Over: I didn't get it right the first time, or even the second time.  But it didn't go too horribly.   I ended up recording the video twice, and I don't even know how many times I did the audio before I was okay with it.

So after I finally had the audio and video as "right" as I could make them, I played around with the callout tools.  The ones I used the most were the arrows to draw attention to small buttons on screen, but my favorite was definitely the one that faded out the rest of the screen to draw attention to a certain section.

My hope is to work in a library where I will have the opportunity to use Camtasia again; I really enjoyed the program.