provided by: 
Originally published at Internet.comThis week we carry on from where we left off in the last tutorial. We covered methods for recording the camera, Picture in Picture (PIP) and some basic editing functions. So far we’ve been working with a Camtasia project file (.CAMPROJ). This week we’ll take that file and output it the Flash format (though there are many more options, such as the Windows Media Player, Flash, Quicktime, etc.). At the end of this tutorial is a section about how to get the best results from your recordings.
Producing the Video
The first step is to go to the Task List on the left side of the workspace, and under the Produce heading, click on Produce video as...
This brings up the Camtasia Studio Production Wizard dialog box. Here you have several options for producing your video. You can choose Recommend my prodution settings, Production Presets, or Custom production settings. Recommend my prodution settings will take you through a number of steps to help you narrow down what target audience you want to reach and the quality you want to give them. For this tutorial, I chose custom production settings option.
Production Presets gives you the option of creating an output to DVD, iPod, Web, Windows Mobile Device and more. The last option, Custom production settings, lets you tailor your output to your requirements.
If you get stuck, you can click on the Show me how to produce my video heading at the bottom of the dialog box. This will open up a video tutorial showing you how to use the Production Wizard.
Clicking on the Next button at the bottom of the dialog box brings up the following dialog box, which allows me to choose the output format. Since we're working with PIP, I chose the Flash (SWF/FLV) format.
Note: If you're working on a different type of project and you're unsure which file format to use, click on the Help me choose a file format heading, at the top right of the dialog box above.
Clicking on the Next button brings up the Flash Templates section of the Production Wizard. This section has many options in it, but to keep it simple, I want to draw your attention to a few settings. One of the things you'll notice is the black box on the far right with PIP in it. This represents the picture in picture video that we were working with in the last tutorial. As such, there are certain settings to consider.
At the top left is the Appearance area and you'll notice the default setting, "One video with PIP." Clicking on the popup gives you the options above. As you can see, you can choose the default setting, which includes the PIP on the lower right corner as set in the previous tutorial, or you have other options, such as producing one video with TOC (table of contents), one video with both PIP and TOC, two videos side-by-side, and more. As stated in the previous tutorial, you would use the two videos side-by-side option if your PIP box covered up important information that you wanted your audience to see. For the sake of simplicity, though, we're going to work with the default setting, one video with PIP.
Note: As mentioned in the previous tutorial, if you use PIP where you embed the video within the fram (as in the templates above), your video layout can be produced with any file format. If you choose the side by side layout, you'll need to produce your video with a Flash format and use a Picture in Picture template.
Let's look at the other settings in the Appearance section. Below the Template popup is the Theme heading. Clicking on this popup offers the options Glass, Matte and Classic. These refer to the style of playback controls that the user sees when the video displays on their computer.
At the bottom right of the Appearance section is the Flash Options button. Clicking on it brings up the Flash Options dialog box within the Production Wizard. This is where you decide what type of video you're going to produce. For the format, your main options are SWF (good for short, low-motion screen videos) and FLV (good for longer, or high-motion videos). As you can see, there are three tabs, Video, Audio and Controls.
More information about optimum settings is in the Additional Notes section of this article.
One of the cool options under the Control tab is the Flash actions section. Here, you can add a Jump to URL effect. What this means is that you can output your video so that when it reaches the end, it automatically jumps to a Web page of your choice. This is a great option if you're selling a product.
On the right is the Size section, where you control the output size of your video. You can choose the original size that you created the video in, or produce the video to a larger or smaller view, based on several default settings. If that doesn't work for your purposes, you can click on the Change Dimensions button and customize the output of your video as necessary. For many video applications, an output size of 640x480 works well. Another size which I've used with success is 800x600. For more output options, check out the Additonal Notes section, below.
At the bottom right of the Flash Templates dialog box is a Help button and at the bottom left, the Preview button. This allows you to see a quick preview of your current project, (a HUGE plus in my opinion). It also gives you access to the Preview Manager, which is used to play, view and compare clip file settings, files sizes, etc. File that are no longer needed can be deleted, if necessary.
Clicking on the Next button takes you to the Video Options dialog box. Here, you can add copyright information about your video, enable SCORM (which is an XML file that gives you information about the components of a content package, such as the course name, description, etc.). The last option allows you to add a watermark to your video. In this dialog we're going to accept the default settings.
Clicking on the Next button bring up the Produce Video dialog box. In this section, choose an output name for your video and a folder location to save your file. Once you've done that, click on the Finish button and your video will begin rendering. Depending on the length of the video, it may take several minutes to complete.
Note: One option here is to upload your videos to Screencast.com. You can read more about Screencast.com in the Additional Notes section.
Once the video has finished rendering, it will open will open and begin playing in a window on your screen. This concludes the process of producing a Camtasia Studio video. What we've covered here covers the basics of video production. There is far more that you can do and explore. Below is some additional information about settings to use when creating video for specific purposes, such as output for YouTube, high quality formats and more.
Additional Notes
Upon deciding to write this series, I wanted to give users the most accurate information I could find. Part of that has come by personal experience, the rest from people such as Chad Wandler, who you were introduced to in the last tutorial. This time around, you'll hear from Troy Stein, Camtasia Studio Product Manager at TechSmith. Below are some questions I asked him about production.
Nathan: I want to cover the process of creating files for the Web. While I want to write about output to the Flash format, I've found my files to be exceedingly slow to stream and quite large, while WMV loads faster, but doesn't offer the interactivity of Flash, such as jump pages.
Troy: "Load time is directly related to fiile size and bandwidth. File size depends on content and compression. If you have a standard screen recording, our Flash SWF should be the best compression. If you have camera footage, or lots of motion in your recordings, the Flash FLV compression will be your best choice. During production, adjust your settings so that the Flash screencast loads at 10% for quicker playback. This is done in the Flash Templates Wizard during production by clicking on Controls in the preview. In Camtasia Studio 3, the playback default is much higher, which is one reason why you were experiencing longer load times with your Flash screencasts."
Nathan: One option that came up is of compressing Flash files more than I'm able to do now. I'm aware of the On2 technology. Will this work with Camtasia Studio 4?
Troy: "The On2 VP6 FLV codec is integrated with Camtasia Studio 4 which works without a streaming server, plays on all types of browsers. Just like Windows Media files, you can simply play the files back off of any webserver. But, if you want to truly stream a video, you need a streaming server, in this case, the Flash Media Server."
Nathan: In this last tutorial, I'd like to know what you recommend for good quality audio settings and which file formats would be best for streaming. In my experience so far, WMV seems to be best. I'd attempted to use the Real format, but I got an error when I output my file (which I couldn't correct), so my intention is to stay away from it. Also, if you want to resize videos to a smaller format, how do you prevent artifacting on the screen and banding? I'm aware of a setting for which is used in Camtasia 3 for WMV, but if there are other things I should know, I'd appreciate hearing about them.
The following are Troy's recommendations for output: * For short screencasts with great quality use SWF.
* Longer and motion intensive screencasts use FLV.
* WMV is Microsoft’s codec and it is bit lossy – so quality won't be as high. But if you are keen to use WMV, use the “Camtasia Studio Best Quality and File Size (Recommended)” during production.
* SWF is limited to 16,000 frames so longer screencasts are out.
* To minimize file size, publish at 10fps, 11.025 mono. Often, you can go down to 5 or 7 fps and still get decent fluidity. Use the Preview button in the production wizard to see how things look before producing the full screencast. * Good quality sound – starts with a good microphone, beyond that, use the audio enhancements in Camtasia Studio 4 to clean up unwanted noise such as machine hum, audio pops and cracks.
Nathan: What format would you recommend for video sites such as YouTube?
Troy: "Users of YouTube are limited by the file formats that YouTube accepts and regardless of the format everything is reformatted to Flash 7 so quality will be compromised."
For reference, YouTube recommended settings are:
* MPEG4 (Divx, Xvid) format
* 320×240 resolution
* MP3 audio * 30 frames per second
Troy continued: "That said, the best format out of Camtasia would be the Camtasia AVI file format. YouTube is going to recompress whatever file you give them. So give
Author: Nathan Segal
Read article at Internet.com site