Stat Computing > Seminars > Making Movies

Additional Camtasia Preferences and Tips

After the Quick Start, you may want to customize how your movie is made.  This page shows some tips on improving the look of your movie.

Try changing your display resolution and colors

Remember that the movie you record needs to be a little bit smaller than the screens on which it will be viewed.  If you record a movie at 1280 by 1024 resolution, it will be hard to watch for someone at 800 by 600 resolution.  We generally choose either 800 by 600 or 1024 by 768 for recording our movies.

You can change your display resolution and number of colors by doing a right-click on your desktop and then choose Properties and then click the Settings tab. For example, below we have set the display to 800 by 600 pixels and 16 bit color.  

Turn off screen saver, turn off clock, hiding tools in the system tray

Before you record, you may want to turn off your screen saver so it does not kick in when you record.  You may also want to turn off your clock, either to conceal the time when the recording was made or, if you need to splice parts together, to avoid a lack of continuity.  You also may want to turn off other tools in your system tray to keep that area clean and to prevent any interactions with Camtasia and the recording process.

Hide the blinking icon when recording

When you record, the blinking icon can be distracting.  You can configure a hotkey to supress this.  Within Camtasia Recorder click Tools then Options (see below). 

Then click on the Hotkeys tab and then click Advanced and that will bring up the screen below.  Below we chose the F11 key to be the hotkey to Hide Camtasia.  So, when you go to record a movies (after you press F9) you could then press, in this example, F11 and that would hide the blinking Camtasia icon from the right corner.

Other program options

If you click on Tools then Options and then click on the Capture tab, you get the screen as shown below.  You can play with the options there to see what you like.  For example "Minimize before starting capture" would automatically minimize Camtasia. We really like the Disable display acceleration option finding that, as promised, it makes much smoother movies.

• Boost priority during capture. If you find the audio lagging behind the video, you can help to eliminate this by checking this box.
• Quick capture. Camtasia suggests that if you have lots of cursor movement in your demonstration, then you should try Quick Capture.

Start applications before you start your movie

We found that if we started an application while recording a Camtasia Movie, the sound could get out of sync from the video, making the movie confusing.  

Test recording levels

Before you record a long 60 minute movie, make sure to do a test recording where you test the recording levels. Sometimes you find that your microphone is muted and would be frustrated to find that out only after recording for 60 minutes. 

What area do you want to record?

Although we showed an example of recording the whole screen, you can record a fixed portion of the screen or a specific window.

Example movies

If you wish to see some example movies, you can see http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/seminars/default.htm and a number of the classes and seminars have movies associated with them.

For More Information

For more information, see our seminar Making Movies for Distribution over the Web .

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