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RE: Software recommendation for recording live demo?
Subject:RE: Software recommendation for recording live demo? From:Penny Staples <PStaples -at- niche -dot- mb -dot- ca> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Wed, 30 Oct 2002 09:59:42 -0600
We use TechSmith's Camtasia and Dub-it products to create .avi files. I'm
assuming that you can convert an avi file to streaming media, but I couldn't
say for sure, as I haven't had to do that. We were producing it for
stand-alone demo CDs. It's worked quite well for us. YMMV
Good things:
- Easy to learn and cheap.
- full 30 day demo version available from their web-site (I don't work for
them, by the way)
- Camtasia captures all of your on-screen actions (windows, backgrounds,
mouse cursor movements, menu sections, etc.) as an .avi video file.
- Edit the .avi video file using either the fairly rudimentary Camtasia
editor, or Adobe Premiere, to remove unwanted frames (like where you paused
to look at your script again) or to re-arrange segments.
- Dub-it lets you dub in and combine a voice-over with the .avi file.
- Easy to splice different segments together into a single file.
Bad things:
- Depending on your application, you may need to refresh screens every once
in a while as you record the video, or the .avi will show junk on the window
that doesn't appear when you're really doing it live. The extra stuff is
easy enough to edit out, but it's kind of a nuisance.
- If you have a lot of voice-over, the .avi files can get very large (ours
show a complete Windows desktop with our application running on it and
narration, at about 8MB per minute of .avi)
Regards,
Penny Staples
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