The background of these instructional videos
I had the opportunity last summer to make some instructional videos to help students use resources available at the Sexton library. When I am searching for information, I usually prefer text to video, but that isn’t the case for everyone. For those who would like to see the process unfold these quick tutorials can be quite helpful. Putting theses short videos together was more difficult and time consuming than I had expected. I have a background in producing commercials for radio, so I wasn’t completely unaware of how long it takes to go from copy to product but this was my first crack at making a video for a client. It was fun and I hope to have the time to make more screen casts in the future.
Software
The software powering the creation of these videos is Camtasia Studio and Audacity. I don’t have anything particularly negative or positive to say about Camtasia, it worked well but it is an expensive piece of software so I expected it to perform well. I think if I had been using a more powerful computer (more RAM and Processing speed) I would have been very happy with it Camtasia a video editing suit as it was I was really just satisfied. Audacity, however, I can’t say enough good things about. It is a shining example of an excellent opensource product. I am sure modern professional audio editing suits run circles around Audacity, but, it easily rivals the audio editing software I was trained on when I completed my radio broadcasting diploma many moons ago. If you have any recommendations for inexpensive video editing software I’d love to hear about them. Recently I gave the free trial of VideoPad Video Editor Home Edition and it seemed pretty solid for a $60 product, but, I’m still looking around. Well enough about software, on to the videos.