Whats New in Camtasia Studio 4?


What’s New in Camtasia Studio 4?

As with any major release, the most recent version of Camtasia Studio sports a number of new features, which I’ll tell you all about in this section.

This round, the new feature set centers on four things:

  1. Audio improvements, focusing on ease of setup for your recordings as well as on more professional sound manipulation techniques on the editing side.

  2. Interactivity enhancements, such as Flash closed captioning and quizzing enhancements to help you easily conduct in-video surveys of your audience.

  3. Usability enhancements, including enrichment of PowerPoint recording, recording and editing niceties, and an auto-check for upgrades.

  4. Increased production choices, including new video (iPod) and audio (LAME MP3, AAC) format options, Production Preview, and entirely new possibilities for the distribution and syndication of your video content.

Let’s quickly examine these groovy new features. They will all be discussed in greater detail as you work through the remainder of the book.

Audio Improvements

While always excelling at the recording and editing of screen video, Camtasia Studio has historically been comparatively weak in its handling of audio narration, leading some users to utilize higher-end, third-party software instead. In version 4, many of these shortcomings have been remedied, for both the recording and editing of your audio.

Audio Setup Wizard

Earlier versions of Camtasia Studio required you to mess around with the Record Control dialog within Windows to set up your system for recording. This involved a certain amount of expertise about the various audio devices and recording sources available. The new Audio Setup Wizard eliminates a lot of that hassle. Just choose your device (usually your sound card or an audio interface), and then select a source: your microphone, your speaker audio, or both at once. The wizard can even set your recording volume automatically based on what it’s currently picking up from the system. The wizard is also standardized to work within the Camtasia Recorder, the PowerPoint add-in, the Camtasia Audio Editor, and the main Camtasia Studio application.

Voice Narration Improvements

When narrating your segments in earlier versions of Camtasia Studio, you had only the duration of the clip in which to finish your narration. If you didn’t time it just right, you could easily run out of footage before you ran out of things to say. No more. The improved Voice Narration tool lets you click the Extend Current Frame button at any point to stop the playback head, yet continue the recording of the audio. Another click sets the video playback in motion again, and the result is a seamless video clip that has been extended to accommodate your lengthy narration.

Audio Enhancements Dialog

This feature is brand new in Camtasia Studio 4, and is particularly exciting for those users who up until now have had to resort to higher-end audio programs for improving their sound. First, Camtasia Studio now offers dynamic range control. This means that if you have fluctuations in the volume of your audio, the program can even these out automatically.

The Audio Enhancements pane also sports a remarkable new technique for detecting and removing noise in your recordings. It’s now a snap to do away with the annoying background hum of your fluorescent lights or computer fan. And the traffic noise from outside your window? Gone. All that’s left are your own dulcet tones. The dialog even offers advanced enhancements such as optimizing for the male vs. female voice as well as automatically trashing the various clicks, pops, and volume clipping that can plague an otherwise good recording.

Flash-based Interactivity Enhancements

With the introduction of version 4.0, Camtasia Studio continues to take advantage of the potential interactivity provided by the Flash video format. This round, there are two major improvements: surveys and closed captioning.

Collecting Data from Your Audience with Survey Forms

In version 3, Camtasia Studio added quizzing functionality to its feature set. This option allowed you to test your audience on the finer points of your just-delivered tutorial with a series of multiple-choice or fill-in-the-blank questions. What if you don’t want to quiz them, but rather collect information from them? The new survey features of Camtasia Studio 4 will let you do just that. You can pose questions in multiple-choice, fill-in, and short answer formats. Later, it’s a cinch to collect this information by e-mail or through a learning management system via SCORM. So, if you have a question that you’ve been dying to ask your audience, now you can!

Closed Captioning for the Hearing Impaired or Non-native Speakers

Camtasia Studio 3 allowed you to add open captioning to your videos, thus extending a hand to those users who are hearing impaired or non-native speakers of your language. Version 4 allows people exporting to Flash to take it a bit further. Now you can add closed captioning to your videos, meaning that your audience can turn these captions on or off with the click of a button. Now, those users who need captions can have them as a resource, and those who find captions distracting can hide them at will. It’s a win-win for your users.

Usability Enhancements

With their usability products Morae and UserVue, TechSmith is becoming a guiding force in the usability industry. In version 4, they continue to “walk the walk” by providing additional enhancements to the user experience in Camtasia Studio.

Easier PowerPoint Recording

One of the most common uses of Camtasia Studio is the recording of PowerPoint slide content. Camtasia Studio gives new users a leg up by offering three different ways of starting a PowerPoint recording: from the toolbar add-in itself, from the Camtasia Studio welcome screen, and from the main Camtasia Studio user interface. Now you can adjust your sound levels, choose to automatically stop recording (or not) when the presentation ends, and move straight to either editing or production. Additionally, users can now choose whether to automatically import any slide notes in their PowerPoint presentation as captions.

Recording and Editing Improvements

With version 4, Camtasia Studio has assembled a small handful of niceties to help you get your recording and editing done smoothly and efficiently. To wit:

  • Camtasia Recorder now sports a new interface that makes current settings more visible and provides access to often-used features.

  • A new Recording Bar will now display just below your capture area to help you better manage your capture.

  • If adding text to your callouts, the callout will now automatically expand to accommodate it. This serves to avoid the constant “type, resize, type, resize, etc.” tweaking that can suck away a lot of editing time.

  • A new Blur callout lets you blur out sensitive information in your video.

  • When adding markers, you now have the option to have a name field for the marker automatically appear.

  • A brand-new Project Properties screen allows you to collaborate on projects with others much more efficiently.

  • You now have the option to produce a selection on your Timeline as opposed to producing the entire Timeline. Now, if you want to create a test production of just one tricky spot in your project, it’s a snap.

  • You can now extract the contents of a CAMREC file directly within Windows by right-clicking the file and choosing an option from the Extract menu.

Autocheck for Upgrades

Starting with Camtasia Studio 4.0, the system will occasionally prompt you to check for upgrades. If you confirm, the software connects to the Internet and checks for you automatically, prompting you to download or purchase if there’s an available update. It behooves you to check often. As TechSmith’s current policy is to only charge for major upgrades (e.g., 4.x to 5.0), you could be getting lots of new features for free. At this time, all minor and maintenance releases of Camtasia Studio are free of charge.

Production Choices

Version 4 also packs some new production power under the hood. This includes minor enhancements such as several new preload screens for your Flash videos, the ability to select a target version of the Flash Player, and a host of production presets. However, there are also three fundamental, earth-shattering production changes that threaten to completely transform your work process…

New Format Options

I thought that Camtasia Studio already offered all the production options anyone could possibly want. And if your users are tied to a computer, I suppose that was true. But with version 4, Camtasia Studio offers two new formats for users on the go: iPod and MP3 audio. Now you can blast your content to students, colleagues, or customers as a screencast or podcast. You can even produce in either of these formats as add-ons to a main video production, handling all production at once.

Audio for your video content has also been greatly enhanced. With the addition of a LAME MP3 codec as well as the ability to compile QuickTime audio with the AAC encoder, your videos will sound better than ever before.

Production Preview

This feature is for those poor souls who have experienced the frustration of a ruined video (usually due to a misclicked check box or some other mundane detail) at the end of a LOOOOONNG production process. Production Preview allows you to conduct a quick sanity check prior to producing the entire video, just to make sure that your options are correctly set, and everything’s copacetic.

Screencast.com

With the introduction of Camtasia Studio version 4, TechSmith has launched an entirely new service to accompany it. Screencast.com is a subscription-based video hosting service that will let you upload all videos and supplemental files, organize them, and control who has access to them. You can then automatically deliver your content to interested users via an RSS or iTunes feed. As if that weren’t enough, you also have access to metrics about how often a particular video is being accessed.




Camtasia Studio 4. The Definitive Guide
Camtasia Studio 4: The Definitive Guide (Wordware Applications Library)
ISBN: 1598220373
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2007
Pages: 146
Authors: Daniel Park

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