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I often get asked by people how do I create my tutorials? What process do you take? I thought I would create this video and walk you through
the steps I take in creating my tutorials. All the way from writing my scripts, recording my audio, all the way through to production.
I know this tutorial is a little bit longer than most of them I create;
so I've added a table of contents for you to navigate through and click on the topics that your most interested in.
If you have any feedback, I'll put a link at the end of this tutorial so you can send me any thoughts, questions,
if you have any tips that you'd like to share with me about how you create your tutorials, I would love to hear from you.
So let's jump right into this first part which is me writing my scripts.
What you're looking at here is just a sample script template that I use, and created in Microsoft Word. It's just a three-column table.
What I do is over here on the audio side I type out my script of what I'm going to say
in my videos, and then over here underneath the action on the screen I'll either put some descriptive text or maybe a screen shot
of what I'm gonna be showing in the video at that point in time. So, if you need more than 10 rows for your script, you can just click down
here and then use the Tab key, and Tab as many times as you want and it's going to make as many rows as you need
for your scripts. So let me minimize this to show you what a finished script looks like.
This is a script from a video I did recently on captions for the Speech-to-text feature.
So you can see over here is the audio of the script that I typed out. On the left hand side is some descriptive text, as well as some
screenshot images of what's going to be shown on the screen. These are helpful because
I share out my scripts with other people on my team. When they're reading through the audio I want them to see what I'm thinking as far
as what's going be shown on the screen at that time.
If I scroll down here you can see how this script was put together, and
if you want I've provided these scripts, both this finished one as well as the template that I just showed you. You can download these if you're
interested, underneath this video that's playing here on Screencast.com; underneath the attachments tab. If you click that tab
you'll be able to see these documents that you can download and use.
If you're also interested you can click this link here and go to our Learning Center and watch this video,
and you can have the script in hand and follow along and see how it worked. So that is for you to use if you want.
one other thing that I neglected to mention is another reason why I write scripts is so I know exactly how long the videos are going to be.
We're kind of targeting a no more than 3 minute video, if possible, some of them are more than that.
But, if I write out a script I know exactly, or pretty close to exactly how long my videos will be.
I kind of have a general rule of thumb that each page of my script is right around approximately 1 minute of audio...
give or take a few seconds. So I know this is just over a three page script, so I'm looking at about a maybe 3 1/2 minute video.
So this really helps me out knowing how long might videos are going to be.
My script once it's done, reviewed, it's perfect just the way you want it. Now I'm ready to record my audio.
So, I'll next show you the application I use to record my audio, and we'll go there next.
To record my audio I use a free application called Audacity. If you go to Google, or
to your favorite search engine and just type in Audacity it's going to be at the top of the list of your search results.
So if you go to the Audacity homepage, click on the download tab, and then find your operating system,
and download the latest version of Audacity.
The one I use is the 1.3 series in Beta, which is for Windows.
I'm going to minimize this, and this is what Audacity looks like. It's a pretty simple interface.
Basically you just hit the record button and start talking. A couple things I do before I hit that record button is I'll go to the edit menu and
down to preferences, and just to make sure I click on the devices tab over here,
and I want to make sure that my microphone, the one I want to use for recording is selected.
I also record in mono instead of stereo.
I also click on the quality tab,
and make sure that this section looks like this
with the 44100 Hz and the 32 bit for my sample format. With those settings created, I click OK.
I also tend to drag down my microphone volume slider here to about 0.6.
I can also control my speaker volume output. This is when you play back the audio,
it will control how loud it is coming out of your speakers.
With those settings all completed all you need to do is hit this red record button and start talking.
Recording your scripts, speaking into the microphone, it's going to pick up everything. If you make a mistake which I often do...
a couple ways, if it's early on in the recording I may stop it and just delete and start over. But if I'm a good ways into it,
I'll typically just keep recording and then pause for a minute...
and then I'll start back up right before I made my mistake, knowing that I'm going back in to delete the part where I messed up.
There's also a hotkey - P for Pause - if I click that on my keyboard, it pauses my recording.
And again I can gather my thoughts and when I'm ready to go I just hit the P again, and it will resume.
I can pickup where I left off or right before my mistake. When I'm all finished I can either pause it, or come up here and hit stop.
Then I can come back in wherever I made my mistakes, I can highlight those
and use these buttons up here to cut out the parts that I don't want any more.
So it's pretty simple. Another thing I tend to do with all my audio is I go into an Effects, Amplify setting.
I will either go into Edit and Select All...
or I can use the hotkeys Control + A to select my entire timeline. Then I'll go to Effect and Amplify.
For me and my settings, I typically drop this down to about anywhere around -5.0 or -6.0, something like that.
I just try to be consistent for all of my videos so that this is going to shrink down my audio waveform to a a little bit quieter...
not so loud volume. So I'm just going to leave it at -5.8 and hit OK, and notice my waveform how it shrunk down a little bit.
I make sure I'm consistent with each of my recordings so that my audio levels are consistent along the way.
So let me acutally minimize this and show you what a finished one looks like. This is the speech-to-text audio that I did.
It's all edited, everything's cut out, amplified down and it's ready to go.
So when I'm finished with it I have to export it. You do that by going to File, and come down to Export.
I usually choose the WAV format, the 16 bit PCM. You have lots of options underneath this drop down menu.
But I like going with WAV because it is going to be high quality, uncompressed, and because when I pull this into Camtasia Studio
and then I produce it, I'm going to be compressing it during the production process.
So I want to start off with the highest quality audio I can.
I will save this out. I've already done this before, so I'm going to hit cancel here. But I'll export it out and then it's done.
How I do my recordings, is I open up my audio waveform in a player like Windows Media, and I'll show you that in a second.
Then I play it back and listen to it while I'm recording my screen.
So let's jump in and look at that process next.
The next step that I'm going to do is record my screen. Before I actually open up the Camtasia recorder and hit record,
I want to get exactly what it is that I'm going to record open on my screen and ready to go.
In this case it's going to be the Camtasia Studio application.
But whatever it is you're recording whether it's a webpage, another application, any window, have it open and go through a dry-run through
of what it is that you're going to capture.
Resize it to the dimensions you want, whether it's going to be full screen or custom dimensions.
Another tip might be, if you're going to be saving to a particular window, or saving a file
or in this case I might be importing media, or if I go to File and do a Save Project as
I want to test that to make sure it's going to the exact location I want it to.
What I don't want is for it to go to some place like my desktop, and then I have to fumble through
during recording and try to find the exact location of where I'm going to save it. Doing a dry run through will help you
figure out specifics steps to take so it will eliminate any unnecessary editing that you have to do later.
So in this case I'm going to be recording captions, so I'm going to go ahead and get to my captions tab...and I think I'm ready to go.
I'm going to open up my recorder next, and I'm going to resize the dimensions exactly the way I want them,
whether it's full screen, or in my case I'm doing a custom dimensions of 1376 by 774. I know those are a little odd...
...but it's just what I've set mine to. This is a widescreen 16 by 9 aspect ratio, and it will resize down to 800 by 450
which is another widescreen 16 by 9 aspect ratio.
And that's actually the size of the video that you're watching this tutorial in right now.
I got that all setup, and another important step is my audio.
I don't need to record audio during the Camtasia recording because I've already done that.
My WAV file is already saved the I created in Audacity.
I'm going to click on this audio button and turn it off. Before I hit record one more thing I need do is open up
my WAV file inside of Windows Media Player.
This is just the application I use but you could simply play it back in Audacity,
or any other program that will play back your WAV file.
I now have that open and ready to go...
and what I'm going to do is I'm going to hit record, and then hit play, and I'm going to be listening to the audio
coming through my speakers while I'm going through and doing all the tasks during my recording.
If you've never done this before it does take a little bit of practice and getting used to.
I actually have two monitors so I can drag my Windows Media player application over to the other monitor so that it's not gonna be
recorded in the window. If you don't have two monitors, you can simply just hit play and then minimize this down to your taskbar.
So, the next step for me is I'm going to hit record, and it's going to give me a countdown, 3...2...1, and then I'm going to hit play.
Then I can minimize it or move it over to my other monitor.
And I'm listening to the audio play back, and when it tells me to do something I'm going to go and do the clicks.
So for example I'm going to click on Speech-to-text,
and it's going to go through and talk about each of these features.
When I say, "Click continue" I'll click that with my mouse.
And I'm just listening to the playback of the audio, OK. So, a question that often comes up is, "What happens if the audio is too fast?"
Maybe I'm not able to click on something here because I'm waiting for something to happen,
and I didn't leave enough pause in the audio and it's telling me to go do something else.
That's where it gets a little tricky, and where a hotkey F9 comes into play.
It's really helpful with Camtasia.
So, what I typically do is just let the process go eventhough the audio is telling me to do something else,
I'm going to let the process go so that I capture all of it.
and then when it's all done I will hit the F9 hotkey in Camtasia.
So, I'm almost there...
Alright, so now I'm going to hit F9,
and pause my recording...and I'll show you that it's paused by opening this up...and I'll also go over
and pause my audio that is playing back. Then I need to drag this back to where I need it to be and I can play around with it.
Becuse it's paused right now it's not being recorded. I need to position it back to where it was,
and then when I'm ready to go I can hit play
and minimize this or move it to my other monitor. Then hit F9 again...
...and I'm right back to where I left off. So now I can go through the next steps and so forth
and look at different things and do my clicks or whatever I need to while listening to my audio
and doing exactly what it's saying. When I'm all done I can hit F9 to pause it, or in this case I'm going to hit F10.
This is going to open up a preview of what I just captured.
Now I can save it. The next step I'll show you is importing into Camtasia Studio
as well as the audio wave file and then we're going to sync it up on the timeline.
For the editing portion of this tutorial I decided to bring in the speech-to-text project that I did for our Learning Center.
So what you'll see over here is the original camrec that I recorded for the speech to text video.
Here's a title slide that was created.
Down here which you can't see yet is the audio waveform that I used Audacity for to record
and brought it in. But when I add these to the timeline for the first time
you will see the editing dimensions dialog window.
Here all I need to do is make sure that I choose the dimensions I wanna use for editing and producing my video.
You'll notice that my recording dimensions were 1376 by 774.
This just happens to be a 16 by 9 wide screen aspect ratio.
So I can go ahead and use by 800 by 450 dimensions which is what I wanna use for my final video.
I'm going to select that here and go ahead and click OK.
It's going to resize my preview window with the video and it fits nicely in there.
One thing that you'll probably notice is on the timeline my
camrec on the video track is quite a bit longer than my audio track. So that just means that I
left my recording run at different times when things were rendering out and so forth, so I had a keep capturing that
then I'll need to go through and cut those parts out to shrink it down and do some trimming and so forth. But what I usually start with
when I do my editing is I have my video on my video 1 track, my audio here, and then I usually bring down my title slide.
I always start from left to right on my video and I just start going across listening to playback and editing along the way.
The title slide, if you notice I brought it down on the video track, my audio 2 track is not linked
to video 1 so it did not move at all. So I'm going to actually zoom in a little bit.
My title slide is 5 seconds, so I typically right click on it and I like to set mine to about 2 1/2 seconds. Then the next thing I want
do is double click this video clip and by doing that it jumps the playhead to the beginning of it,
and I need to put a transition in here so that it's not such an abrupt change from the title slide to the video recording.
So I'm just going to use hotkeys which I use all the time and it saves me loads of time. I'm going to use T for transition,
and it brings in the last transition I used, which was a fade, and it's set to one second.
Hotkeys are wonderful and they help save me a lot of time during editing, and T for transition is just one of those.
Again, I'm moving from left to right. Now my audio, as I drag this over and it snaps to the beginning of my video clip.
So, it's going to play back, fade to the video clip, and then start playing with my audio.
Another thing you'll notice as I drag this across, if you look up in the preview window my arrow is kind of screaming across the screen there.
This is at the beginning of my recording, I hit record and I try to get my arrow positioned, or
my cursor positioned where I want it to start. So I typically have to cut out a few seconds at the beginning of each of my recordings.
By doing that, I'm going to double click this to position at the beginning and I think it was about 3 seconds.
So I'm going to drag this red out point on this playhead and you'll notice this duration section of that tool tip which is really helpful.
I'm going to drag it to get as close as possible to 3 seconds... When I let go I've just selected about 3 seconds.
Now if I hit cut, I'm going to cut both video and audio.
I don't want to get rid of my audio so I'm going to lock that track. Now when I hit the cut icon, it removes that 3 seconds and it keeps my audio
right where it was. And it moves everything to the right it moves it to the left.
So now when I play this back, another hotkey that I use a lot is the space bar.
It'll play back my video on the timeline and it will also pause it. So when I hit play I'm going to be watching to see if my
video and audio is in sync in the preview window.
The speech to text feature automatically creates captions from voice narration or audio on the timeline.
When you click the speech to text button you'll see this...
Alright, so the main thing I was looking for was that I went up and clicked on that speech to text button when I was saying it. So I'm off a little bit
it's easy to change. All I have to do is hit Control Z or use this undo button here, and it brings back and keeps it selected at that 3 seconds.
If I needed to go 3 1/2 seconds, I can just grab this and go as close to 3 seconds, 15 frames
and then I can cut that.
And I can play it back again and see if it's in sync and so forth. So again that's how I usually start is by trimming out
the very beginning and making sure that the beginning of my video is in sync with the audio.
Another thing for this one, I'm going to double click this again,
is I want to actually zoom into this area rather than start out at full screen.
When it fades into it I want to be zoomed into this captions area.
So I'll position my cursor here at the beginning, I'm going to use Z for zoom as the hotkey.
and it zooms into this area and then I can use
my slider here.
I like to go to 100% sometimes. SmartFocus usually does a great job of jumping it right to 100% for you.
So then you just have to drag this, if you need to...sometimes it puts it in the right spot, but I'm going to drag this up here,
and position this where I want it in my video.
I can also by clicking it using my arrow keys on my keyboard, I can position this right where I want it. And you'll notice that it's pretty
blurry up here in the preview window that is because I'm on shrink to fit. If I go to 100% scale you can see that
the text is very easy to read. But shrink to fit just allows me to see more my screen up here.
So that's how I'm going to start. So if I come back to the beginning and hit play with my space bar
it's going to fade right into that particular area
of the window so it's not going to actually have to zoom or pan anywhere. Now it goes up and clicks on speech to text,
and here's another spot right here. So I'm working from left to right and now I want to zoom into this window that just opened up.
So at this location I can try to position it exactly where I want, but sometimes when I see where I need to zoom again,
I'll just hit Z for zoom, and it drops in another zoom point. Then I can...I'm going to zoom in just a little bit more...
and then I'm going to use my arrows to jump down just a little, that's a little bit better, and now I'm going to play it back
and see if it actually zooms at that right time. So I'm going to hit play...
That was actually pretty good. But if it wasn't, I can click here and drag to reposition it wherever I want on my timeline.
And that's just kind of my process. I will start left and then start moving right and I'll be listening and playing back.
If you look at the final video you'll notice that there's going to be a lot of callouts happening through here, but I don't worry about callouts
at this stage of editing. My main goal at the beginning is to trim out parts I don't want,
keep things in sync between my video and audio,
zooming in and panning when needed and getting everything so that it looks and sounds
correctly and in sync. As far as editing things to make sure they're in sync, let me fast forward this a little bit,
there's a part in the video I think it's when I click on the continue button right down here when I go over there and click continue.
In the actual video I had to extend that frame a second because I clicked on continued to soon and it didn't sync up with the audio.
So how I do that is I'm going to click my playhead here, and use my arrows to jump along, and right before I click continue...
I'm going to go back a couple frames...
At that frame right there I want to extend it another second, as I want it to stay visible on the screen for at least one more second.
I can do this a couple ways, I can position my playhead here, go to Edit, Extend frame
or, again I like using the hotkeys.
So, I'm going to use E for extending that frame.
It's going to prompt me and ask me how long the duration I need. I'm just going to use 1 second, but I could put anything in here.
When I hit Enter or click OK...
it's going to take that frame and make a split and add 1 second of a still frame image
right there in that spot and move everything to the right.
So, now that particular frame will stay visible and I won't click on continue until it passes and then I click on it.
So that's the process you need to take if you ever need to add some extra frames to your video clip
to move along is used using that E for extend frame. It's a little bit different for audio, for example if I needed to move my audio
to keep things in sync I would want to lock my video track and unlock my audio track, position my playhead where I want to extend it
and then I could use this button here to split it, or again the hotkey is S, and when I hit the S key it makes a split in just the audio
because my video was locked. Now audio works differently, I can drag it and position it wherever I want.
Unlike video where if I make a split it will not drag to the right and left, it always has to be butted up next to the clip to the left of it.
so audio just works a little bit differently,
a little bit easier to work with as far as being able to split it and just move it wherever you want.
Once I get through syncing everything up, that's when I go back to my video and I will do things like add callouts to my video if I need them.
I'll also go to my audio tab and remove background noise.
I may add cursor effects, if needed. There's still other effects you can do. I always had captions at the very end which is the last thing I do.
That's pretty much it. What I think I'm going to do next is actually bring in the final edited video for the speech to text
project so you can actually see what it looks like on the timeline completely finished, so let me do that next.
Here is the final project that's edited and ready for production for that speech to text tutorial that's on our Learning Center.
You'll notice that there's quite a bit done and different looking on the timeline.
If I kind of scrub across here, I'm hovering over a callout. So this is a sketch motion callout that I used.
If I just jump over to this one, here's a Camtasia Studio tool tip and I usually leave this tool tip in my library.
Then it's in there for every project and I can drag that down to my callout track and I can add text to it if I need to.
This particular callout in this video has a pink color, and that is this hotspot. I added a Flash hotspot in here so that users
can click on this link and go straight to the Microsoft web site
helping them download and install the free software if they're running XP for their operating system.
But again you see all these callouts across the timeline. Here's an example, let me zoom in a little bit.
Here's that example where I extended that frame, so if I hover over this you'll see that it's one secon in length,
and I had to extend that 1 second so that it synced up with my audio a little bit better. I think there's another example of that here
having to sync that up. If I go a little bit farther you'll notice my audio I had to split it a couple times and drag it to the right.
And there's audio here on the audio 3 track that is audio that was playing back through my speakers when I was
demonstrating how to edit the captioning process in the editor up here, so I had a move over my audio.
I just had to make a split and move them over and help me keep things in sync. And you'll notice at the very end I got a transition here
that takes me into my end slide for each of my videos. So again that's basically my process, I will start left to right
you'll see my zoom and pan keyframes of my zoom track, you'll see my callouts
that I add later, and my captions are the last thing I typically add.
I think the next thing I'm going to finish with is my production which is pretty straight forward.
I'll walk you through the production wizard and show you the settings that I use for my videos. I'll do that next.
The final step in this long tutorial is going to be the production process that I use.
Once my editing is finished and completed, everything is added to my timeline, I'll come up and click on the produce and share button.
I'll always choose the custom production settings option and click next.
I'll use the Flash outputs format.
I use the ExpressShow controller, the black theme, and MPEG4 file format.
Since I have captions in my video, I want to make sure that I have these two boxes checked.
Closed captions allows the viewer to hide and show the captions if they want to.
If you don't want to give them that ability you can just uncheck it, but I like to keep that checked for my videos.
The video size, notice that it says editing dimensions...it's pulling the editing dimensions
that we set at the beginning of the editing process.
It added on an extra 18 pixels to the height of the video
because of this controller bar at the bottom of video. It doesn't affect the video size, the video size
as it's still 800 by 450, but it adds on that 18 pixels for the control bar at the bottom.
I always click on a Flash options button. Underneath the video tab...
the only thing I change here is I make sure it's on the bit rate for the encoding mode and the default is 800 kilobits per second
I usually jump mine up to at east 2000. Again you can play with these, I know people have had success leaving it at 800.
It just kind of depends on what quality you want, and also to note that the higher the bit rate is the file size it is adjusted.
So if you want a smaller file size video you may want to see about keeping this as small as possible. I then click on the audio tab.
The default is at 56 kilobits per second,
I will bump this up to at least 96 and I've gone up to all least 128 before.
Sometimes I play it right in the middle and keep it at 112.
Again, you can play with this and see which bit rate works best for you. Same with file size, the higher the bit rate the higher file size will be.
The controls tab, the only thing I do here is I uncheck these three boxes because I don't use the start, end screen, and about box.
Everything else I leave at their default settings. Then I click apply and OK.
That's the last thing I do on the Flash controllers page, and then I click next.
On the video options page, I always check this box to embed the video in HTML. Another nice thing is this HTML options button.
If you want to change what it says on the title of the HTML page, you can do that right here pretty easily.
And then just click OK and it will set that and burn it into your HTML page.
Click next, and on this last page of the wizard
I just give it a name and choose a folder location on my
system to save the produced video to and I hit finish. That will produce out the video
and then it's ready to be shared with my audience.
I hope you found the information in this tutorial helpful. If you have any feedback, thoughts or
tips of your own that you'd like to share, I'd love to hear from you.
Thanks a lot for watching!