A Guide to successful Video Production

While practising to make my bit of a video I have encountered several problems. Here are some of the problems that I found:

• Smoothness of Delivery
• Audio Blanking
• Audio Quality
• Audio Dropout
• WMV Format is Essential

Description and fixes:

Smoothness of Delivery

At first it is very hard to make a smooth delivery of the verbal description of what is happening. Do not despair! – this problem will go away enough to do an acceptable job. Here are some tips:

1. It is worth writing an actual script, which clearly distinguishes between “stage direction” and “narrative”.  Print this script, or if possible display it on a second monitor. The idea is not to rote-memorize the script, but to record the details of terminology that you want to use (e.g. the difference between “project” and “package”), to make sure that your presentation has a good logical flow, and to order the mouse operations in a neat way so that you are not constantly switching backwards and forwards between different windows in a way that is confusing for the viewer.
   This is good work for programmers – it’s no more than we always try to do with our algorithms!
2. Practice plenty of times. If you do, you will find that the job “meets
   you half way”. You will quickly remember the order of things that you want to explain, and you will find that you can fill in the bits between on the fly,in your own words, in a way that sounds very natural and conversational when you play it back. Expect to modify your script a little after every try – particularly the ordering of mouse operations, which will sometimes require a re-ordering of the logical flow of your explanations.
3. Do not start talking the instant you click the Camtasia Record button, or hit F10 (to stop recording) the instant you stop talking. It seems to take Camtasia a couple of seconds to start and stop recording reliably, so click Record (or stop talking) , and silently count “one, two, three” before you begin talking (or hit F10).
4. The F9 key is your friend. Press F9 and recording will pause. Press F9
   again to continue recording. Don’t wait until you are tonge-tied and
   confused before you press it – there’s a weird kind of paralysis which kicks in and makes finding F9 hard. As you practice you will soon learn where the natural breaks are, where you want to scroll your script, take a breath, and organise your next paragraph in your mind.
5. Remember that every go is a practice, until you happen to get one that satisfies you. Also remember that you can hear every little error – the question is, will the viewer notice anything? Go into a quiet and private place to practice if that makes you feel less self-conscious.

Audio Blanking

The Camtasia Recorder control window (with the “Select area to record” button) offers some interesting menu items:

Effects/Cursor/Highlight Cursor is really good – it provides a yellow circle
around the cursor in the finished video which can be used as a pointer to
gesture at interesting things as well as a practical aid to spotting where the
cursor is. Turn this on (a black dot appears by the option).

Effects/Sound/Mouse Click Sounds and Effects/Sound/Keyboard Sounds sound good but actually they are bad news. The problem is that the generated click is embedded in a region of generated silence, which over-rules the narrative from the microphone at a really important point. Do not use these effects!

Audio Quality

All of the available codecs except “MPEG Layer-3 (TechSmith LAME)”
(henceforth “LAME”) produce dreadful audio quality in the finished WMV product. It is necessary to use LAME for recording.

In the Camtasia Recorder control window (with the “Select area to record”
button). Choose Tools/Options…, click the Audio tab, click the Audio Format button and select Format as LAME. Name should be left as [untitled] – this seems to come with LAME. Press OK in the Audio format window, and then OK in the Options window.

Audio Dropout

LAME is the only good codec, but it has a problem of its own. When recording sequences longer than a few seconds I found that the audio would suddenly disappear in the finished product. This does NOT happen in the Camtasia player that starts during the production process, but does happen in the finished WMV file, when I checked them through carefully. The other audio codecs don’t seem to have this problem, but produce unacceptable quality.

Google finds lots of pages about Camtasia audio problems, and one common
suggestion is to use a USB microphone rather than one which plugs into the
analogue sound card. This morning I plugged in a USB microphone and made a WMV with good quality audio which did not disappear after a few seconds.

After Windows has detected the microphone, it can be selected in the
Camtasia Recorder control window (with the “Select area to record” button),
Tools/Options…, Audio tab, where the Audio Format button is found.

WMV Format is Essential

The AVI format offered by Camtasia requires a special codec to be present on the playback machine. This presents an unnecessary barrier to entry, which can be solved by rendering the final product in WMV format instead. The additional benefit is that WMV output files are about 60% the size of AVI output files, with no appreciable reduction in the clarity of e.g. fine fonts in the Eclipse Package Explorer or audio quality.

In the Camtasia Production Wizard (which pops up at the end of recording, after you’ve saved your recording) select “Custom production settings” and

click Next>. Select “WMV” and click Next>. Then keep clicking Next> until you reach the Produce Video screen, where you click Finish.
Rendering in WMV requires a lot of time and sometimes it is problematic… very often Camtasia ” randomly” produces WMV file containing only part of the video (in my case only 3, 5, 8 minutes on 11), so when rendering it is better to:

• close all your applications
• disable the screen saver
• disconnect the cable of the network
• do nothing and to leave Camtasia 100% of the CPU!

At the end play ANYWAY the file in Windows Media Player and verify that is complete until last frame!

Regarding AVI files

AVI files are affected by problems when played in Windows Media Player, the voice at the beginning disappers, so don’t use them.

Regarding Flash files

I didn’t find any particular problem with Flash .flv video files.

Here is a great php tip for those who want to load a different image into your header every time the page loads. For example, you may have a folder of images that you want to rotate in your header or any element of your site for that matter. Here’s how to do it.

Place all your images in a folder and name them something like this:

• pics/image1.jpg
• pics/image2.jpg
• pics/image3.jpg

Use the php rand() function to give your header an random id.

<div id="header<?php echo rand(1,3); ?>">
<!-- header content here --></div>

The rand function in the code above returns a random number between 1 and 3 which is what we want. So every time the page is loaded, we get an id of either header1, header2 or header3. In you CSS you can now markup like this.

DIV#header1 {background-image:url("pics/image1.jpg")}
DIV#header2 {background-image:url("pics/image2.jpg")}
DIV#header3 {background-image:url("pics/image3.jpg")}

Now your page loads with a random header image. Brilliant!

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Reflex.js	Curl.js
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