Camtasia Project Rendered As A GIF Animation

I must own up to having lain awake in bed last night, wondering what a Camtasia project rendered as a gif animation would look like. Intrigued, I decided to render a 30 second camtasia project as a gif animation using the default settings. The whole of the production process took around a minute to complete and yielded surprising results. The quality of the 'video' was actually quite high, but it made one huge gif - 2Mb. A 2Mb gif!

Of course, other disadvantages are that there is no sound and there are no video controls.

Behold - the Camtasia project rendered as a gif:

Note: for some reason Blogger doesn't like this gif animation and so is not 'playing' it, but you can gauge the image quality at least.

What Is Camtasia?

Camtasia is basically a screen recording program that provides the following functions:

Voice Recording

You can provide voice narrations for your video, either while you are recording the screen or afterwards.

Export To A Variety Of Formats

With Camtasia you can produce the final movie in the following formats:

• Flash (FLV or SWF)
• WMV - Windows Media streaming video
  
• MOV - QuickTime Movie
• AVI
• iPod/Itunes
• MP3 - audio only
• RM - RealMedia streaming media
• CAMV - Camtasia for Realplayer streaming media
• GIF animation

The mind boggles at what a video tutorial produced as a gif animation would look like. I hesitate to try. Most of the video tutorials I've made have been designed for presentation on a web page and so they have been exported in either SWF or FLV. Some videos have been destined for higher quality presentation on DVDs so .MOV was the movie format of choice.

Zoom and Pan

To emphasize particular areas of the screen you can zoom in on them. This is particularly useful if you are recording at a large resolution and it might otherwise be hard for the viewer to see exactly what you are doing in that part of the screen. Zooms can be smooth or instant.

Transitions

There are some basic transitions available using effects such as checkerboard, pixelate etc. Their names give a good clue as to what they look like. If you have two separate recordings you might introduce a transition to move the viewer gently from the first to the second.

Menus

Camtasia enables you to create menus allowing the viewer to jump directly to a chosen video. If you have a large selection of videos, it may make more sense to provide a menu as opposed to forcing the user to sit through them all sequentially. Menus can be geared towards web or CD presentation, with the CD route also offering an autostart function that is triggered when the CD is loaded.

Typically users use Camtasia to produce the following kinds of movies:

• Video tutorials
• Marketing presentations
• Software demos
  

Check Your Work

This may sound obvious, but checking your work is vital. Camtasia settings are not saved with Camtasia projects. This means that if you start a project without mouse clicks being indicated, for example, then work on another project that does require mouse clicks to be indicated, when you return to the first project Camtasia remembers the last settings used and enables mouse clicks in your recordings.

Of course this happened to me.

I started a Camtasia project with mouse clicks disabled. I checked the first batch of videos I produced with a fine tooth comb and they were A-Okay. Later, I got to experimenting with mouse and keyboard sounds. On returning to the project in hand, I sprayed mouse clicks everywhere because Camtasia had retained the last settings used.

Rework.

A catalogue of retained settings that meant a whole lotta extra work now follows:

• Mouse click sounds
• Keyboard click sounds
• Highlighted cursor
• Watermark (see note below)
  
• Video resolution

Note: regarding including a watermark in Camtasia Recorder - i.e. as you are actually recording the screen - DON'T DO IT! Doing this causes untold sufferring if you forget you've done it. Those 200 videos you were compressing for Microsoft? Yep, they've got the OpenOffice logo on them. Bill won't be pleased. Including the watermark in Camtasia Recorder permanently burns the watermark onto the video. It can't be removed without some complex chemical process (or maybe some Adobe After Effects masking). Given that you can include your watermark when you are exporting the movie into your desired format, I can't see the need for ever specifying it in Camtasia Recorder. It gives you nothing extra.

To view/amend your current Recorder settings, in Camtasia Studio click Tools > Camtasia Recorder. From here you can access all of Camtasia Recorder's settings. You can get to the sound settings by clicking Effects > Sound. The dreaded watermark setting is viewed by clicking Effects > Options > Watermark. Keep away, keep away.

So the recommendation here is to:

1. Always check your Camtasia Recorder settings before you start recording.
2. Always check the final product. Hopefully following step 1 will reduce the number of duh! moments in step 2.