Showing Rather than Telling: Capturing On-Screen Demos with Camtasia

Joe St Sauver, Ph.D.
Director, User Services and Network Applications
joe@uoregon.edu

Unfortunately, all too often that's impossible, and support staff frequently end up trying to talk users through complex processes on the phone or via email. Such experiences can often be frustrating for the user, and they're also potentially fraught with errors.

Printed documents that include screen shots can help eliminate some of these problems, but given the prevalence of dynamic graphical user interfaces, what would really work best in many cases is a short on-screen demonstration, or "screencast."

TechSmith's Camtasia Studio (http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp ) is an example of a relatively inexpensive (educational price: $149) commercial application that makes it easy to create screencasts under MS Windows. Camtasia can record what's displayed on your PC while integrating voice narration, or even video from a web camera. Once you've recorded your project, you can then edit it by adjusting the audio or video, adding titles or other text, and so on. When your project is complete, you can output digital movies in a variety of different formats.

New users are guided through the process of creating a screencast by a very easy-to-use wizard, while those who are more experienced have full control via a point-and-click graphical interface and/or keyboard shortcuts.

To briefly show what Camtasia can do, I've created a small sample screencast in Windows Media format which you can view at http://www.uoregon.edu/~joe/sample-screencast/spam.wmv

Things to Note:

• Take a lesson from the TV news people: simple, short, and sweet topics make the best screencasts.
  
  
• Carefully script your screencast before you begin recording anything.
  
  
• When you first begin to create your screencast, don't expect perfection on the first "take." You'll likely end up recording all or part of your screencast multiple times before being more-or-less satisfied with the result.
  
  
• Don't let a self-imposed desire for perfection keep you from experimenting with screencasting. Your screencasts are virtually certain to at least be better than my little example mentioned above. :-)
  
  
• While my example was in Windows Media format, you could also save your screencast in QuickTime, Flash, or other formats, depending on your audience and how you plan to deliver your screencast (via the web, on CD, etc.).
  
  
• Screencasting applications are primarily designed for the creation of on-screen demos, but since they can capture anything displayed on the screen, they can also be used as a sort of "digital video recorder" to capture online presentations, video conferences, or other online events (be sure to get the permission of the copyright holder or conference participants before making any online video recording with a screencasting application).
  
  
• A final thought: while screencasting applications include limited editing capabilities, they do not have all the features and capabilities of a dedicated video editing product, and should not be considered a replacement for one.

Questions or Comments about Screencasting?

UO users should feel free to call me at 346-1720, or drop me a note at joe@uoregon.edu