| As promised, this is the first in a series of blogs explaining how we are creating and producing our new video training library. We are in the home stretch of a project to dismantle and recreate 24 hours of video training in a new easy to use format. Bill and I thought it would be fun to tell you how we did it. |
Watch Bill's
Camtasia Demo |
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The first tool we had to find was software to record the training. We had a copy of Adobe’s Captivate, which we had used in the past. It did a good job with the video creation and is definitely a tool of choice by many education departments in the high tech business world. However, ultimately it was not fast to edit a created video. We estimate that it was taking around 6 hours to produce a 5 minute video (from storyboard/setup to final production). For the true digerati, Captivate is cool because it allows you to edit frame by frame. But this was not ideal for our team. We needed something that would allow us to record and edit much faster.
We have always used a product called SnagIt to capture screens for documentation purposes. It’s a cool image capture tool that allows you to snag just the area of the screen you want to display and then provides editing tools to make the picture even slicker for presentation. SnagIt led us to another product made by TechSmith called Camtasia Studio.
I have to wax poetic here for a moment; this product truly was the answer to a prayer for us. Not only is it easy to record, it’s easy to edit your recording, add additional tracks, and add images. Suddenly, we found our time to produce a video cut drastically. Bill can now record and edit a 5 minute video in about 45 minutes to an hour. It then takes me about 30 – 45 minutes to produce it.
So, with Camtasia, we were able to cut a 6 hour production cycle to 2 hours. This product gave our project new life. So without further ado, here’s Bill with a short 3 minute video on Camtasia and how it works. We think this would be a cool ministry tool.
Watch Bill's Camtasia Demo
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