Chapter 12: The Production Process

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Overview

After recording all your segments with the Camtasia Recorder and editing it all in Camtasia Studio, you have one final step in creating a fully functioning, stand-alone video. It’s time to take your edited footage and produce it in a file format that best suits your audience and your content. In this chapter, you’re going to take all the different elements and process them into a seamless, sweet-smelling package. Along the way, you’ll be making choices that will affect the size, aesthetics, and functionality of your presentation, and it’s the job of this chapter to help you navigate through this maze of dialog choices so that you have an end product you’re happy with.

This chapter is split into four sections:

• Recommend My Production Settings. The simplified Production Wizard is a relative novelty in the land of Camtasia Studio. It essentially asks you a series of questions about your content and how you want to share it, and then poof! selects all your production options for you. As it’s a very handy tool for the novice, I’ll give you the dime tour, but you’ll really get your hands dirty with…

• Common Production Elements. This section identifies the common elements of all the file formats, letting you in on what choices are available to you during the process. Production dialog screens common to all file formats are covered in detail within this section, including Video Size, Video Options, Marker Options, and the Produce Video screen.

• The File Formats. In your Production Wizard dialog, you have nine file formats from which to choose (well, actually 10, as SWF and FLV are two distinct formats). I’ll explain all the options available for each of the available file formats, and more importantly, exactly why you’d want to use the format in question. In this section, the encoding options for each of the file types are discussed.

• Custom Production Presets. This section teaches you the ins and outs of creating, editing, and using customized production presets. Just select your production options once, and you can use them forever. No muss, no fuss.

The first section applies only to people who are brand new to producing and possibly intimidated by all the options. The second section is for all y’all, covering choices you’ll need to make regardless of what the video’s file type is going to be. As for the third, I expect that people will want to read up on the specific file format in which they want to produce, and you won’t hurt my feelings if you ignore the rest. Of course, if you aren’t sure what file format you need, it would be helpful to at least read the first few paragraphs written about each file format so that you can make an educated decision (though I do give a brief summary of each at the start of the section). The fourth and final section, while not essential to producing, will save you time if you plan on producing a number of videos in a consistent format. By creating a preset, you won’t have to muck around with specifying your file settings each and every time. Preset creation is a good skill to have. Regardless of what path you’ll take, we all start at the same place. We have to tell Camtasia Studio that we want to produce.

Production of your video is accomplished thusly:

• From the File menu, choose Produce Video As….

  or

• Press Ctrl-P.

  or

• Click the Produce Video As tool on your toolbar, which looks like this: .

  or

• Click Produce Video as… in the Produce submenu of your Task List.

You’ll end up on the Production Wizard dialog. You now have a variety of options from which to choose. Let’s discuss them.