How to create a screen movie using Camtasia Studio
Camtasia Studio is one of the most comprehensive screen capture software packages on the market, so do not get shocked when you first open it and try to make your way to your first demo movie or training tutorial. You might need a while to master its advanced features but creating a simple screen video without many extras is not that difficult. Besides, unlike some other packages, Camtasia Studio has a detailed documentation, where you can have a look, when you need help.
1. Open Camtasia Studio. You will see a dialog box that presents you with several choices. To start a new recording, select the Start a New Project by Recording the Screen option. This opens the New Recording Wizard.
2. In the New Recording Wizard, choose what you want to record - a region of the screen, a specific window or the entire screen and when ready, click Next. Unless you have chosen to record the entire screen, the next dialog will ask you for the dimensions and the coordinates of the screen region you want to record.
3. The next screen of the New Recording Wizard asks you whether you want to record audio and video as well. If you want to record audio or video, two more screens will appear, asking you to select the options for audio and video recording.
4. After you have chosen your audio and video input devices, you are only a step away from starting your first recording with Camtasia Studio. The last screen of the wizard displays info about the keyboard shortcuts for starting (F9) and stopping (F10) of the recording. When you click the Finish button, the wizard will vanish. Now you have to press F9 and start recording.
5. When you want to stop the recording, press the F10 key. This will open a dialog box where you are asked to save the project. By default, new recordings are saved in the proprietary .camrec format but since it is likely that you will need the demo in another format, you need to change this before starting the recording.
The choice of screen capture formats is not that rich - actually the second format that Camtasia Studio supports saving to is AVI. The format in which the movie will be saved, can be changed from the General panel of the Options dialog box, which can be opened from the Tools menu. But still, if you need the final output to be SWF, there is a workaround - you convert an AVI file to flash files by importing them. Then you need to follow the instructions of the wizard and after a couple of steps, you will have the AVI file converted to SWF. Camtasia Studio can also handle Quicktime and realmedia file formats.
6. After you save the project, the Post-Save Options dialog box appears and there you can choose if you want to edit your recording or simply continue recording the next one. Even if you choose not to edit your movie at that time, you can do it later.
With a comprehensive screen capture software package like Camtasia Studio, you have incredible options for editing your recording and turning it into a masterpiece. Simple editing of the recording includes removing unnecessary portions of it (can be as simple as selecting the portion you want to remove and clicking Cut), replacing parts of the audio narration, adjusting the volume, extending or shortening the narration to fit the length of the movie, selecting various cursors or highlighting mouse clicks to make them easily noticeable on screen, creating Flash quizzes, etc. But for all these advanced steps, you will need more time and practice and frequent consultations with the documentation of Camtasia Studio.