Camtasia

September 10, 2011

Camtasia  

A Video Screen Capture Editing Software

     Camtasia is a screen-capture video-editing software. What that means is that is captures the time action on a computer screen. Most of the YouTube instruction videos that present you with "how to learning" are done with such software.

    I was motivated by friend that I see several times a week at Dunkin Donuts. He's been producing interesting DNA videos based on what is called "fractals of order'. He uses Adobe Premiere to capture his work in 3DMax. Adobe Premiere is the "Rolls-Royce" of video-editing software, which 3DMax is the "Bentley" of 3D design, movie-animation characters, and building image-drawn futuristic or olden scenes.

   I decided to check out Camtasia creator - Techsmith, and I found out this week that Camtasia was on sale. So, I bought a copy of Camtasia for Mac.

The opening interface of Camtasia

 The video interface that you see as you are "filming".

The Audio portion of the program.

The black area above the audio is where the small-sized video frames are.

The program "pretends" to act like a film camera, and moves at so many frames  per second.

The upper left part of the program.

This is where your videos reside or where you can import other parts of videos to "splice together"

The reverse-play-forward button

The Video Effect Menu

When you press on the small rectangle (see below), a menu of effects comes up.

This will allow toy to rotate, zoom in and out, add background colour and a whole myriad of 

"glitz and glamour".

However, just like the book-publishing software, you have to add effects "conservatively", as you don;t want the video to become "cartoonish" or have the effects detract from the video.

An enlargement of the 3 effects "windows"

The Audio Effects Window

   I wouldn't recommend going out and purchasing this software yet. If you have a digital video camera, or a digital camera or DSLR that you purchased in the last 6 months, it may already come with video capabilities. If it does, work with what you have, and then if you feel you need something better, download Camtasia for free on a trial basis for 30 days.

I changed the relative sizes of some areas.

You might need a larger-size for the audio and video frame at the bottom, and less viewing area.

A Glow Effect - A Video Effect

This was achieved by simply dragging the "blow effect" rectangle on to the image.

The same image without the glow effect

I reversed the effect by simply applying an edit>>undo command.

The Actual Video-Click to Open

The video quality is not very good.

It's "fuzzy". You'll have to enlarge this with your PC or Mac Commands just to see what is going on.

Hopefully, when I start to learn more I will be able to fix this video quality. I will have another instalment of Camtasia in a few weeks.