Camtasia is a well established screen recording tool which, in its latest incarnation (released June 27th 2005), lets you save files in AVI, WMV (Windows Media), MOV (Quicktime) and SWF (Flash) and a few other formats such as RM (RealMedia) and animated GIF. You can record actions on the entire screen, a marked region or a specific window. To record a region, you just drag a rectangle over a portion of the screen and Camtasia outlines the selected area when you start your recording.

Once you've recorded a screencast you can edit it in Camtasia Studio. Video clips are loaded top-left, a preview is shown top-right and the timeline appears at the bottom.

Although screen recording tools have been available for many years, they have gained much wider interest recently. This is no doubt due, in large part, to the success of the Flash format for streaming animations embedded in web pages. This makes it possible to provide interactive tutorials, product demonstrations and quizzes which can be accessed on the Internet. The trendy word for a Flash animation of this sort is ‘screencast’. We use screencasts on Bitwise so we admit to a keen interest in this type of software.

The recorder is a separate application. It lets you record the whole screen, a rectangular area or a selected window.

When you want to capture a window using Camtasia Studio, you pass your mouse over the screen to highlight and select a window (which may be a specific window ‘pane’ such as the editing area of a word processor or an main application window enclosing the entire user interface - editing area, menus and toolbars). In fact, you don’t really select the window itself but the screen area which it occupies. If you move the window during the recording process you will end up recording the part of the screen which it occupied before you moved it. Usefully, Camtasia supports multiple monitors so when you want to record the screen on a PC with more than one monitor, it first lets you choose a monitor.

Here I am selecting the browser pane (outlined in red) prior to making a recording.

There are options to record with or without a narration and the software can optionally add sounds for mouse and keyboard clicks. However, in my experience, these have a high irritation factor unless used very sparingly, due in part to the over-dramatic click effects which sound more like armies of Orcs on the move than my delicate digits tapping away on the keyboard. Moreover, the clicks do not correspond exactly with actual key presses so are best used only when key presses are few and far between. If you record text being typed, you will not get one click per character.

There are various other recording options too. For example, you can automatically highlight objects such as windows and menus when your mouse passes over them; you can add a time stamp or a caption to a recording and you can display a coloured highlight over the mouse pointer or animated circles around the pointer whenever a mouse click is recorded. Unfortunately, mouse-pointer effects are permanently embedded into the movie at the recording stage and cannot be removed or altered later on. It would be better if these effects could be selectively turned on and off in the editor; this can be done in rival products such as Blueberry Software’s BBFlashback (http://www.bbsoftware.co.uk) and Macromedia’s Captivate (http://www.macromedia.com).

Clips are saved to disk in AVI format and these can then be loaded into a separate playback and editing program. The editing program provides a simple timeline, with one track for video clips and another for audio. Optionally you can open up separate tracks for callouts, hotspots, zoom and pan and ‘Picture in Picture’ effects. Basic video editing features are provided to let you cut video and add various transitions such as fades, dissolves and wipes in order to blend one clip into another. You can record a narration at this stage or add ‘callouts’ in the form of various shapes such as arrows and bubbles containing text annotations. If you want to create really snazzy interfaces for your screencasts there is a tool called Camtasia Theatre which lets you build menus to act as a launch pad for multiple screencasts.

One of the major problems when creating Flash format screencasts for viewing on the Web is the sheer size of the files. A recording of a few minutes of activity in an application such as a word processor can easily result in a Flash file of several megabytes. If your recordings are image-intensive (for example, if you include photographs or video) the file size may rapidly grow to tens of megabytes in size. For users without broadband, big Flash files can be extremely slow to download. Even with broadband, the download times of huge Flash files can be a major disincentive to potential viewers.

The JPEG compression option lets you dramatically reduce the size of some Flash files.

Usefully, the new release of Camtasia provides optional JPEG compression which can significantly reduce the size of files containing complex graphics, images and video. I tested this feature on three very different recordings: 1) a 19 second screencast of a word processor, 2) a 2 minute, 46 second Windows Media format (WMV) video including an audio track and 3) a Camtasia recording of some photographs being viewed in the Microsoft Picture Viewer.

Movie #1 (the word processor) was saved as 275K Flash movie with no difference in size when the standard rate of JPEG compression was applied. Movie #2 (the WMV video) was saved as a massive 65MB Flash movie by default but compressed to a ‘mere’ 9.3MB when JPEG compression was applied. Movie #3 (the Picture Viewer) was saved as a 12.6MB Flash file as standard but compressed to 1.36MB when JPEG compression was used. JPEG compression does result in some reduction in image quality but, frankly, if your Flash movies are intended for the web, a small sacrifice in image quality is well worth a large gain in download speed.

One snazzy new feature is the addition of a Picture-in-Picture (PIP) recording tool. The idea is that you record your screencast and then pop up a smaller recording such as a ‘talking head’ video in one corner of it. You should, in theory, be able to record this using a video camera or webcam to narrate the video while simultaneously watching the original screencast on your monitor. In practice, I had problems with this. Using a Sony camcorder attached via a USB cable I was able to display ‘live’ pictures from the camcorder but I did not succeed in recording any. The view from the camcorder is visible right up until I click the on-screen ‘Start Recording’ button, at which point it frustratingly disappears. I have reported this problem to Techsmith but, at the time of writing, it has not been resolved. If you want to see how PIP should work, take a look at some of the examples on the Techsmith web site.

Ideally you should be able to preview your screencast on the right and record a picture-in-picture video on the left.
I had problems, however...

Among the other new features in Camtasia Studio 3 there is a Quizzing tool for creating interactive screens of multiple-choice questions. The user can play the quiz by clicking one of several answers and receiving instant feedback to show whether or not the answer was correct.

You can create multiple-choice quizzes by filling in a few text fields...

...and this is the quiz that results.

There is also a Titling tool for adding text or graphics at the start of a movie or in between individual clips and there are ‘interactive callouts’. At first sight these look like ordinary callouts (speech bubbles and annotations) but, in this release, they have gained an extra trick. An interactive callout can act as a Flash hotspot, which means that they can be used to jump to a specific part of the movie (which can be defined by a frame number or a special marker) or they load a specific web site into your web browser. This is an improvement over the hotspot feature in the previous release of Camtasia which could only be added to rectangular areas of a movie and only responded to clicks after the movie had stopped running. The new callout Flash hotspots respond to clicks while the movie is still running and can optionally cause the movie to pause until the user clicks the hotspot to continue.

Here I am annotating a screencast with a 'speech bubble' callout.
I've designated this as a hotspot so that the specified URL will be loaded when the callout is clicked.

Overall Camtasia Studio 3 is an extremely powerful tool. Apart from the problem I had when attempting to record ‘picture in picture’ videos, my main reservation is that it generates a separate Flash SWF file for the video-style controller that lets you play, stop or rewind screencasts. This Flash controller is embedded in a web page along with the screencast recording itself and requires some complicated (auto-generated) HTML plus a separate XML configuration file. Originally, I had planned to keep all my HTML web pages in one directory and all my SWF files in another. Trying to do this with Camtasia screencasts provide to be an almost impossible task (well, anyway, I couldn’t figure out how to do it!) so in the end I admitted defeat and put all the HTML and SWF files in the same directory.

THE X(cess?) FILES

Camtasia generates separate Flash format files for different elements of a screencast. For example, my dogpix screencast comprises the file dogpix.swf which is the recording I made, plus dogpix_controller.swf, which is the ‘video style’ control panel shown beneath the screencast and dogpix_preload.swf, which is the ‘Loading’ message that is displayed while the screencast is downloading from the web site to your computer. These files are glued together using one HTML file and one XML configuration file (shown below). The advantage of having a separate configuration file is that you could, if you wished, edit it by hand to alter (for example) the percentage of the movie that is preloaded before running or the colour of the control bar. The disadvantage of all these files is that it makes it hard to separate them into different directories on a web site in which specific file types may be stored in specific locations. It also makes it tricky to load screencasts into third-party web design applications such as Macromedia’s Dreamweaver.

						  
dogpix.html :: Camtasia-generated HTML file
<html> 
<head> 
<!-- saved from url=(0025)http://www.techsmith.com/
--> 
<title>Created by Camtasia Studio 3</title> 
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
  charset=iso-8859-1"> 
                              
 <script language=javascript type="text/javascript"> 
 function OnLoad() 
 { 
 } 
</script> 
                              
                              
</head> 
                              
<body > 
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" align="center" width="640"> 
<tr> 
<td ><object id ="flashMovie" 
codeBase ="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,0,0" 
height ="497" 
width ="640 " 
classid ="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" VIEWASTEXT> 
  <PARAM NAME="_cx" VALUE="26"> 
  <PARAM NAME="_cy" VALUE="26"> 
  <PARAM NAME="FlashVars" VALUE="csConfigFile=dogpix_config.xml"> 
  <PARAM NAME="Movie" VALUE="dogpix_controller.swf?csConfigFile=dogpix_config.xml"> 
  <PARAM NAME="Src" VALUE="dogpix_controller.swf?csConfigFile=dogpix_config.xml"> 
  <PARAM NAME="WMode" VALUE="Window"> 
  <PARAM NAME="Quality" VALUE="high"> 
  <PARAM NAME="SAlign" VALUE=""> 
  <PARAM NAME="Menu" VALUE="-1"> 
  <PARAM NAME="Base" VALUE=""> 
  <PARAM NAME="AllowScriptAccess" VALUE="always"> 
  <PARAM NAME="DeviceFont" VALUE="0"> 
  <PARAM NAME="EmbedMovie" VALUE="0"> 
  <PARAM NAME="BGColor" VALUE="#FFFFFF"> 
  <PARAM NAME="SWRemote" VALUE=""> 
  <PARAM NAME="MovieData" VALUE=""> 
  <PARAM NAME="SeamlessTabbing" VALUE="1"> 
  <EMBED id ="EmbedflashMovie" 
     src ="dogpix_controller.swf?csConfigFile=dogpix_config.xml" 
     flashvars ="csConfigFile=dogpix_config.xml" 
     quality ="high" 
     bgcolor ="#FFFFFF" 
     width ="640" 
     height ="497" 
     type ="application/x-shockwave-flash" 
     pluginspace ="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"> 
</EMBED> 
</OBJECT> <br></td> 
</tr> 
</table> 
</body> 
</html>

<config>
  <AutoStart>1</AutoStart>
  <MovieWidth>640</MovieWidth>
  <MovieHeight>480</MovieHeight>
  <BackgroundColor>FFFFFF</BackgroundColor>
  <MovieURL>dogpix.swf</MovieURL>
  <ShowLoadingMov>1</ShowLoadingMov>
  <LoadingMovURL>dogpix_preload.swf</LoadingMovURL>
  <ScaleLoadingMov>1</ScaleLoadingMov>
  <LoadingMovPercentToLoad>50</LoadingMovPercentToLoad>
  <LoadingMovMinDuration>3</LoadingMovMinDuration>
  <ControllerColor>C0C0C0</ControllerColor>
  <ShowFFRW>1</ShowFFRW>
  <ShowAbout>1</ShowAbout>
  <AboutBoxText></AboutBoxText>
  <TimeDisplayFormat>MM:SS</TimeDisplayFormat>
  <ShowDuration>1</ShowDuration>
  <ShowElapsedTime>1</ShowElapsedTime>
  <TimeDisplayFont>Arial</TimeDisplayFont>
  <TimeDisplayFontColor>000000</TimeDisplayFontColor>
</config>

Note: we shall shortly be reviewing other screencast tools including BBFlashback and Captivate

Huw Collingbourne

June 2005