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Using Camtasia Producer for Flash productions
Using Camtasia Producer for Flash productions
by Rick Hendershot, Videoinabox.com
I've been playing
around with online audio and video for years and have always been unhappy with
the mainstream alternatives — Windows Media, Real, and Quicktime. What a pain
having to encode for different players — and then trying to get those players to
work. It is no wonder that rich media has been stalled for the last three years
or so.
About a year ago, when I was working on some video tutorials, I
stumbled onto Camtasia. TechSmith had just started including a flash encoder in
their upgraded suite of screen capture tools ("Camtasia Recorder / Producer"),
and I found I could create some very good looking (and sounding) software
training videos by using a combination of these tools. The final step in the
process involved using Camtasia Producer to encode the finished .avi file as a
.swf, and then embed it in a web page. This worked like a charm,
was
relatively easy, and the quality was surprisingly good. Here's
an example.
But, as usual, there were some problems...
First,
I didn't like Camtasia's clunky stock control buttons. TechSmith had anticipated
this, and actually made a separate controller available — one with more
functionality, and one that looks much better (see the sample.) But to add it to your flash movie you have to do some
work in Flash MX. If you happen to own Flash MX — it is ridiculously expensive —
you probably agree with me that it succeeds in making even simple little tasks
like this painfully difficult. No problem. I spent a couple days learning enough
of Flash to get by, and was able to crank out quite a few demo training
sessions.
Second problem: the Camtasia system is based on screen captures
and uses a special codec that gives you incredibly crisp images at very low fps
(usually about 5 fps). This is great for screen captures (software tutorials),
but no good for regular videos that have much more motion, and a higher frame
rate. Using the Camtasia tools to encode regular video into .swf files creates
files that are much too large for streaming or progressive downloads. So "real"
video can't be done in Flash with this set of tools.
Curses! This means
the enterprising online video guy is back to using a hodge podge of tools.
Forget it!
Third problem: the Camtasia system (Producer) is really based
on the screen-capture-to-tutorial model, and doesn't have enough flexibility to
handle straight audio productions. So if you want to just take an online article
and create an audio version of it, there is no easy way to do it.
Well,
that's not quite correct. Creating a Flash audio controller amounts to creating
a "movie" -- some buttons that control an audio source. So you can simply use
Camtasia Producer to add the stock control buttons to a stripped down video —
say just a couple of photos strung together into a "movie". For a while I took
advantage of this to create "radio" presentations that included photos (see
this example.) I actually constructed simple videos (.avi) with Ulead
MediaStudioPro, and crunched them through Camtasia Producer to encode them as
.swf files.
But this was not what I really wanted. I just wanted a fairly
simple tool to let me control audio productions from a web page. Using Camtasia
Producer for this was overkill. My productions involved a clunky work flow using
a mish mash of tools. And in the end Camtasia Producer simply does not (did
not?) have enough audio handling capabilities — and certainly no audio editing
capabilities. So you pretty much take what you get.
For creating
screen-capture-based video tutorials Camtasia is a great tool. Especially if you
augment it with a program like Ulead Media Studio Pro that recognizes the
Techsmith codec. But I had moved beyond tutorials. My mission was to find a tool
to produce and control simple "talking articles" (audio), and very simple flash
videos, and clearly Camtasia Producer did not fit the bill for either of
these.
In Part 2
of this series I look at a product called Flix Pro from Wildform. This is an
honest to goodness video encoder which also packages your video in a variety of
flash players.
Other Reviews of Camtasia Studio
www.designer-info.com
- "In each case the control over your output is comprehensive letting
you choose target bitrates, frame settings and so on. With Flash output you can
even specify a preloader, an end Jump to URL and Producer will produce the HTML
code to host your SWF for you.... Camtasia Studio provides an excellent
all-round solution from initial recording through to final
delivery."
www.flashmagazine.com
- "What really impresses with this release is the attention to workflow and
the huge improvements to the interface of both products. They both do what they
do really well, but this time round they look and feel like more confident
products."
www.about.com
- "Camtasia Studio is probably the most complete and well-supported screen
recording package available for Windows."
Rick Hendershot is the
founding publisher of The Linknet Marketing Resource Library, and has been
dabbling in online video and audio for a number of years.
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