LibCasting » Screencasts

Camtasia:mac 2.1 Adds Green Screen & Clip Speed

Greg R Notess — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 05:18:41 +0000

Techsmith announced today an upgrade to Camtasia for Mac to version 2.1. The announcements mentions two significant new features:

Clip Speed: Like in Camtasia Studio 7, Camtasia for Mac can now speed up or slow down a section of video
Green Screen: Add a green backdrop to a video and then remove that color to put the person in front of the screen. This feature is not yet available for Windows users

Other changes listed include

YouTube sharing options now include tags, description, and privacy
Increased the number of fonts available for text elements
Added support for .mov files with more than audio channels
Added keyboard shortcut to show/hide the marker track
Added keyboard shortcuts to select next and previous media
Add preference to turn off recording status icon
Added ability to scroll on the timeline via the keyboard
Added the option to scale media from the center instead of the corner
Added an arrow shape with a border
Added aspect ratio lock in adjust canvas dialog
Added scale readout while resizing objects on the canvas
Increased the scale precision in properties panel
Improved rendering of resized frame effects

And of course, they have a screencast to demonstrate the new features:

Updated Captivate: 5.5

Greg R Notess — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 14:42:11 +0000

Just before last weekend, Adobe updated Captivate to version 5.5. The new features include the following

Gradients, shadows, and rotation
Updated quiz templates
Publishing to MP4
Ability to publish to tablets, smartphones, and iOS devices
Single click publish to YouTube option

Also new is a subscription pricing model. Pay $59/month on a month-to-month basis or $39/month with a year commitment. Captivate is also sold as part of the Adobe eLearning Suite which is now at version 2.5. The suite includes Flash Professional, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Acrobat Pro, Presenter, and Audition. The Suite retails for $1,799 ($599 for education version). The Suite is also available on a new subscription pricing plan: month-to-month ($135/month) or per year ($89/month). The new subscription pricing does not appear to be available for education purchasers.

Camtasia Studio Minor Update: 7.1.1

Greg R Notess — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 20:40:31 +0000

Techsmith updated Camtasia Studio to version 7.1.1 last week. The maintenance release mostly includes various bug fixes,but the announcement also highlights:

Updating the My Screencast.com plug-in
Fixing the a problem where a lack rectangle or table of contents covers the video
and incorporated a requested option to show a rectangle around the area being recorded (as opposed to just flashing green indicators in the four corners)

Strangely enough, after installing the update and checking the version number under Help > About, the new version number is 7.1.1 (Build 1785, but it is dated way back to Jan. 13.

If you have Camtasia Studio and have not yet updated, just go under Help > Check for Update to get the maintenance update and then install.

Screenjelly Dead and Gone

Greg R Notess — Mon, 30 May 2011 22:01:14 +0000

While their Twitter account still exists, Screenjelly has not posted for over a year. When I checked screenjelly.com today, it redirects to a strange SteinerSports picture and email request page (which is why I have not linked it). Parent Veodia.com (which also bought out ScreenToaster) ends up at a “You reached an inactive URL address” message. ScreenToaster which earlier went defunct now just results in an Apache “successfully installed” page. So they all seem to be defunct. I’ll be updating my software page to remove the links.

All the more reason to continue supporting, using, and Screenr and Screencast-o-Matic for free, online screencasting and hosting. Here are a few recent examples that I have tried on each:

Screenr: Google Scholar Settings
Screencast-O-Matic: Embedded small version below. This is an example for a forthcoming book (more on that later) and includes notes (comments) at two points in the timeline. I had not realized I could add those at Screencast-O-Matic in the past.

Assessing Screencasts

Greg R Notess — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 00:41:50 +0000

I’m not in Philadelphia for ACRL today, but there was an interesting session this afternoon entitled “Do Screencasts Really Work? Assessing Student Learning through Instructional Screencasts.” Even better, ACRL has posted the PowerPoint slides, the paper, and a handout with links and sources. These report on research from the University of Michigan library attempting to answer the question “do undergraduate students really learn from watching these videos?” The study included 15 undergraduate students who were pre-tested, shown two screencasts, and then post-tested on the same tasks (finding a subject-specific library database on the library’s website). The two YouTube-hosted screencasts can be seen at UMich’s site: Why Use Library Databases and Finding Library Databases, and both were created using ScreenFlow (Mac software).

The conclusion? “The results of this study indicate that screencasts facilitate student learning. By viewing instructional screencasts, most students learn how to successfully complete a multi-step research process, such as the series of tasks in this study. Most students are able to transfer their knowledge of the concepts involved in the process and apply it in new scenarios.” While this is a limited study it does show that instructional screencasts can be successful.

Screenr + YouTube = Free Callout Editing

Greg R Notess — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 21:48:42 +0000

Since the demise of ScreenToaster (and I can’t even get to their site today) and my expectations that ScreenJelly may not last long, I’ve been looking for a new favorite among the free, online screencasting tools. Screencast-O-Matic has greatly improved since I last looked at it, and the editing options with the oh-so-affordable $9/year Pro account, make it even more compelling. I’ll have a more in-depth review of Screencast-O-Matic and its newer features later. However, today, I was impressed while playing around with Screenr. I used to consider Screenr primarily as a tool for Twitter users. But what I realized today is you can use Screenr to record a screencast (up to five minutes) and then upload to YouTube where you can use the Annotations function to add call outs. It is not full editing, but it does give the ability to create text bubbles and notes over the video, and that is one of my favorite editing capabilities.

Here’s the screencast, embedded. I’ll have to create another one to show how to do this. If you don’t want to listen to the whole thing, the call out annotation is at 1:58.

Or go direct to it on YouTube.

Music Only Screencast

Greg R Notess — Tue, 27 May 2008 03:47:43 +0000

I came across another screencast that only uses audio to add a music soundtrack. I was checking out the CrossLoop page which has a link to their demo video. Like the excellent CustomizeGoogle demo, the CrossLoop demo uses text within the screencast to communicate its main points. While I liked the screencast and watched most of it, I found that with this sound track I turned the volume all the way down part way through it. Is it more a sign of my musical tastes or do others share the opinion that the music at CrossLoop does not work while the CustomizeGoogle does?

Not to sound too negative to this screencast, I do like a couple of other aspects of the CrossLoop demo:

Small size (video window about 320×240 pixels, delivered by default as a pop-up)
The way it zooms in to the relevant section (it looks to me like it was created with Camtasia Studio 5 using the new SmartFocus pan and zoom feature.

For me, this is a good example of how adding music may turn out to take too much time and energy to find an engaging track that is not distracting from the information content.

Simple GIF as Screencast

Greg R Notess — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 21:05:04 +0000

While I have known for some time that Camtasia can output a video to an animated GIF, I never had need of it previously. But as I was updating my search bookmarklets page, I thought that it would be nice to have a visual example of how the transfer search bookmarklets work. So using Camtasia Studio 5, I recorded a short video (without audio), edited it a bit, and then generated it as an animated .gif.

Camtasia gave me several settings to choose from, including how many times to repeat the animation. I went with 3 and added ending title slide so that it would end on that description of demo. One great advantage of an animated .gif is that is is very easy to embed it in a blog post like this one or on a Web page like the search bookmarklets page.

The disadvantage is that viewers lose the controls of a standard video file. The stop, rewind, and replay functions are not easily available. I toyed with the idea of using a small .swf-based video instead of the animated .gif. But that takes much more work to get all the appropriate coding on the page, the JavaScript in the header, and all the embed codes working correctly. Despite their documentation’s claims, I did not find an easy way to use Camtasia’s ExpressShow to embed the small video on my page when I host it on my own site. If I use Camtasia’s option to upload to screencast.com, then I get a much easier embed code snippet to use. Trying that here in WordPress, it pastes fairly well, but for an unknown reason to me, it runs the 14 second video in about 3 seconds. Assuming that it ran correctly, I’m curious as to which version most people would prefer to see on a page like my search bookmarklets page.

Free Older Version of Camtasia Studio

Greg R Notess — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 15:24:44 +0000

Until January 7, Techsmith is offering a free version of Camtasia Studio 3.1.3 (the latest version is up to version 5.0). The download site says it is an “exclusive offering for PC Plus Magazine readers from the United Kingdom” but another site that links to the deal says that they “have confirmation from Techsmith stating we have now extended the offer to everyone.” This older version apparently will not with Vista, and it also will not have all the improvements found in versions 4 and 5, but my memory of using it was that it was still relatively easy to use and could produce good screencasts. If you had been planning on buying the latest version of Camtasia Studio, install this free download and you should be eligible for the upgrade price.

In addition, if you have been looking for a more robust screen snapshot program, Techsmith is also offering an older version of SnagIt 7.2.5 (current is 8.2) for free. For both of these offers, you first need to download the software and then register for the free key. Remember, these offers expire January 7, 2008!

Virtual Chase Screencasts

Greg R Notess — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 06:15:53 +0000

I’m pleased to see that Genie Tyburski is now adding screencast to her wonderfully informative Virtual Chase site on legal information. She is using Camtasia Studio 5 and discusses the software and hardware being used. I expect more will be forthcoming, but for now, here is a list of what she has available.