Stat Computing > Seminars > Making Movies

Quick Start to Making a Movie with Camtasia Studio Recorder

This page shows how to quickly make a movie using Camtasia Studio Recorder in four steps

I. Record your movie
II. Edit your movie
III. Produce your movie
IV. Post your movie

I. Record your movie

1. Start Camtasia Studio
   Click Start then Programs then Camtasia Studio 2 then Camtasia Studio
2. Create a New Project
   Click File then New Project
3. Start the Recording
   Click on Record the Screen as shown below
   
   
    
4. Specify options for the Recording Wizard
   
   Choose what region you would like to record, e.g., Entire Screen
   
    
5. Select Audio Input and Level
   
    
6. Last Screen of Wizard
   We like all of the default options here, so we hit finish at this point.
   
    
7. Select Additional Preferences (optional)
   Now you have Camtasia Recorder visible and you can select additional options or preferences. See our Additional Preferences for Camtasia page for additional preferences.  We will accept the defaults for now.
   
    
8. Start Recording Your Movie
   Minimize Camtasia so it does not show up on the screen.
   Press F9 and Camtasia will start recording.  In the bottom right of your screen, you will see the little Camtasia icon blink red to indicate that it is recording.  See Additional Preferences for Camtasia for how to shut this off.
9. Stop and Save Your Movie
   Press F10 to stop your movie.  Camtasia will ask you where you want to store your movie, and what you want to name it. Your movie will have an .avi extension.  We will save our movie as mytest.avi
   
   Your movie will be saved and then played with the Camtasia player.

II. Edit your movie

1. You can drag your movie from the Clip Bin to the storyboard area to edit the movie.
   
2. Note, even if you do not edit your movie, you still need to drag one or more clips from the Clip Bin to the storyboard.

III. Produce your movie

While you can make many different kinds of movies (quicktime, realmedia, avi, etc.), we are now using the Macromedia Flash format for distributing our movies.  The files are small, very clear, and can be viewed in most web browsers.  If the plugin is not already installed, the web page will automatically download and install it.  Here are the steps we use for producing our movies.

1. Move your clips to the storyboard (if you have not done so already)
2. Click Produce Video As (as shown below)
   
    
3.  In the first screen (see below) we choose Macromedia Flash.
   
   
    
4. In the next screen (see below) we generally choose a frame rate of 10, 16 bit color, and 22Khz audio (this is the highest quality short of stereo, which is not needed since we are recording in mono format).  The macromedia flash format has a maximum of 16,000 frames in a move; hence the maximum using 10 frames per second is 1,600 seconds or about 26 minutes.  If you go down to 5 frames per second, then the maximum movie length would be about 52 minutes.  If you need to make longer movies, you may want to consider splitting the movies into sections.

   
    

5. In the next screen we recommend choosing the largest movie recommended (this is assuming we recorded the movie using 800 by 600 resolution).

   
    

6. In the next screen (omitted), you can enter a Watermark.   You can just choose Next to skip this.
7. In the final screen (also omitted), enter the name you want for your movie.
8. In this example, we recorded the movie as test.avi and then produced the video as test.swf. Camtasia producer created four files,
   • test.html - the file you can post on your web site
   • test.swf - The multimedia flash file that is played via test.html
   • test_controller.swf - I believe this is the plugin for playing the file
   • test.xml - I believe this is the configuration file for the plugin

IV. Post your movie

You can open test.html in a web browser and view your movie locally, but you probably want to put it up on the web for the world to see.  Copy all four of these files to your website and then when you link to test.html people can see the movie that was recorded.  Also, if you are familiar with html coding, you can carefully modify test.html to add your own title and such to the page.

For More Information

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

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