OK. You can get a 30 day trial of camtasia here from Techsmith. Its a rather big download (about 243MB), but you can do a lot more with it and its a lot easier than a lot of programs I've looked at. So, to get into it, lets take a look at what you can do with the program.
For tutorials, I usually have an intro, and sometimes, I will have music underlying the track, and then finally, an ending (generic brought to you by with company information and such).
Step 1 - Getting started.
Use the screen recorder to make your tutorial. Whether you use scripts or not is your choice, but don't worry too much about mistakes. They can always be edited out (and the cuts added to a blooper reel
)If you do make a mistake, just pause for a second and then carry on. You can use that second's pause to cut your mistake from the clip.
Shortcut: F9 starts the recording, and F10 stops the recording, and you get three seconds to compose yourself before it starts recording.
When you've pressed F10, camtasia will show you a preview of what you've recorded and you can then click on save and edit, and the recorder will load the clip into camtasia for you, where you can choose the recording dimensions - In the drop down box, I usually choose recording dimensions, and then you're on to step 2.
Step 2. - Putting the clip together.
Camtasia has a library with music tracks and pre-made intros that you can use to start your tutorial with.
When you look at camtasia, your timeline is at the bottom of your screen, and it only has one track, which is the video and the audio combined.
Let's say that you want to change/improve the audio quality of the clip, you simply click on the clip in the timeline to highlight it, right click, and look for "separate audio and video" and it will separate the vid for you so that you can edit the audio, cut pieces of it, or add extra narration to the video. First things first, let's clean up the audio.
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Click on any of the clips on the timeline, and then click on the audio button on the "taskbar". It opens all the audio editing tools you can use.
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Enable volume leveling - levels the audio so that there aren't too many loud and soft areas in the audio. you can choose High, medium, low and custom settings for this tool.
Enable noise removal - says it all. it makes sure that all you hear is your voice (with a few keyboard click in between).
You can also choose to fade the clip in and out. I use this for my backing tracks though, and not the tutorial itself. Once you're happy that the audio sounds good, you can then add your intro and ending clips, or create more recordings, import them into the clip bin, drag and drop them onto the timeline and repeat the process of splitting the audio etc.
Step Three - editing out mistakes.
Just above the timeline, there is a smaller toolbar. There is a zoom function, that zooms in and out of the track, making it easier for you to do precise editing, The undo and redo buttons, the cut button (to cut mistakes, or make a clip shorter etc.), the split button (to help you split tracks), and lastly, the copy and paste button.
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To edit a clip, you simply play the clip until you get to an area you want to remove and using the red and green "buttons" on the left and right of the slider, you move them to the areas you want to remove. Green for the beginning, and red for the end, and you click on the cut button to remove those sections. The more you zoom in, the better you will be able to control how much is removed when you cut.
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Part two to follow
