Tutorial: Producing Screencams in Camtasia Studio
If you simply click Tools, then wander down till you get to the Word Count menu item, your movements look tentative, and you may even slide inadvertently past the menu item you want and then have to return to it. A better approach is to click Tools, hold the mouse steady until you spot the desired item, then scroll down directly to Word Count. During editing, it’s extremely easy to delete static segments in the video, but almost impossible to fix irregular and tentative motion.
To ensure that your mouse movements always have smooth path, even over multiple captures, use the F9 key in Camtasia 5 to pause your recording (rather than clicking Pause in the record window). Later, when you click F9 to start recording again, Camtasia will move the cursor position to the last capture location.
Most other items relate to simplifying the inevitable recaptures necessary to fix problems identified by the client or your own review. For example, don’t adjust the position of application windows and other moving interface elements as the program opens and closes them while you’re recording. Most programs open these windows in a default position that doesn’t take into account your adjustments, and if you have to recapture, it will be very time-consuming (and frustrating) to realign the window into the precise capture location. If the program offers the ability to save a workspace or window configuration, set up the windows as desired, save the workspace, and return to that workspace when you have to recapture.
If you do have to recapture segments of the video, open the segment that you’ll be attempting to match and scroll to the last usable frame. Observe the location of the mouse and which windows are active, which, in Windows, appears as a dark header bar. Otherwise, peruse all the details of the screen until it’s identical to the video you’re attempting to match. Attention to detail at this stage will save you the irritation of recording a 5-minute segment only to find that it’s unusable because it doesn’t precisely match the previous recording.
I try to capture the entire video in one sitting to minimize the risk of anything changing in the application or desktop. However, since I know I’ll be splitting the videos up into sections, I capture them a section at a time.
Again, I play the narration while I’m capturing to help synchronize the audio with the captured video. In general, I find it easier to record a short segment four or five times to get it perfect rather than attempting to record multiple takes and piecing them together during editing.
Setting Up Your Project in Premiere
So you’ve captured your video, and now it’s time to edit. Camtasia Studio has some excellent features, but lacks the precision, polish, and limitless multitrack capabilities offered by Premiere Pro and most other editors. In this section, I’ll describe how I set up projects in Premiere Pro and identify the key editing tools I use while editing screencam projects.
Let's look at Premiere Pro’s New Project window, which opens to the Load Presets screen. There are no appropriate presets for screencam work, so you’ll have to create your own. Click the Custom Settings tab on the upper left to open the screen.
Always set the Frame Size to your target output resolution, which is the 800x600 shown in Figure 4. I use 15 fps for my projects, but I’m sure 10 or 12 would be fine. However, Pixel Aspect Ratio must be set to Square Pixels and Fields set to No Fields, otherwise your video will get mangled during output. Conform your other settings to those shown on the screen, and if desired, click the Save Preset button to save the preset for later use.
Working in Premiere Pro
Now it’s time to import your captured screencams into Premiere Pro. As you may know, when Premiere Pro imports a clip, it sets the Anchor Point in the middle of the clip and adjusts the horizontal and vertical position to ensure that the clip is in the middle of the frame. This is shown in the Before section, where I’ve imported a 1024x768 capture clip into an 800x600 project.This default behavior works well with most normal projects. However, for screencam projects, I find it simpler to edit when I’m working with an anchor point at the upper left edge, which translates to 0x0 in pixel location. For the most part, this is because I tend to move the video around the output window a lot. With the original Anchor Point, moving the video 10 pixels to the left adjusts the position to 390x300, which makes little sense and is hard to remember. After resetting the Anchor Point to 0x0, the same shift to the right results in a position of -10x0, which is much more intuitive.
The first thing I do with my clips after dragging them to the timeline is to reset the Position and Anchor Point parameters. I do this manually for the first clip, then use Premiere Pro’s Copy and Paste Attributes function to copy the parameters to all subsequent clips added to the timeline.
Basic Editing Procedures
Once you’ve got the video on the timeline, drag your narration audio down to an audio track and start trimming. The basic goal, of course, is to synchronize the captured video with the narration. Typically, to accomplish this, you’ll need to trim out some sections and lengthen other sections using an assortment of Premiere Pro’s trimming tools. Let’s work through several scenarios to get a feel for the tasks and tools involved. For the most part, these are the same types of activities you normally perform during editing, though some are a bit specialized for screencam edits.
1. Deleting sections of captured video—You’ll do this a lot. Suppose you clicked File > Open in the application to open a new file and the Open window doesn’t appear for 5 seconds. No need to keep that latency in the screencam. Or, back to the example above, suppose you were looking to click Tools > Word Count and paused for a moment or two to get your bearings, then smoothly and boldly scrolled down to Word Count. You definitely want to cut that delay out as well.
To accomplish this in the first example, drag Premiere Pro’s current-time indicator (CTI) on the timeline to a few frames past where you clicked File > Open. Either click the razor icon in the Tools Panel on the right, or press C on the keyboard, and cut the video at that location. Then add another cut to the location just before the Open window appears and delete the new clip. Eliminate any open timeline by right clicking and choosing Ripple Delete. Of course, you could use the Ripple Edit tool to accomplish the same thing, but I find adding cuts and deleting the unwanted segment a bit more straightforward.
2. Lengthening sections of video—Suppose you were describing a function and the related narration took 5 seconds longer than the video that you captured. In this instance, you’d need to lengthen the video by 5 seconds, a job at which Premiere Pro’s Rate Stretch tool excels.
Start by adding an edit (otherwise known as inserting a cut) at the start of the video that’s supposed to match the audio–otherwise, the rate stretch adjustment will affect the entire video clip. Then click the Rate Stretch tool and drag the right end of the clip to the desired end point. Voila! Premiere Pro slows the video down to the required playback speed to match the gap you’re trying to fill. Otherwise, you could right click the video select Speed/Duration, and set either duration or playback speed manually, but the Rate Stretch Tool is typically faster and easier.
3. Speeding things up—Suppose there
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