Have you ever thought about using SnagIt for more than just screencapture? I wanted to share with you a new resource that's been added to our Learning Center. There's a great new creative tutorial series which you can find here. There are 12 tutorials that will walk you through projects ranging from creating a water color painting to making Comic Book Graphics. Take your SnagIt skills beyond screencapture!
What other types of projects would you like to see added to the tutorials?
]]>It's a quick video and runs just over 5 minutes long. I hope it answers some of your questions and offers you some insight into what we're working on.
I will be giving you regular updates here on the blog and via Twitter. And, we have a Mac newsletter - sign up for a subscription or get the RSS feed here.
What questions do you have about Camtasia Studio for the Mac? Troy and I will be making another video soon.
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This week, I'm in hot and sunny Las Vegas for the New Media Expo. TechSmith will have a booth there. If you're attending the show or in the area, stop by! We'd love to chat with you.
Next week I'm off to Gnomedex in Seattle. I'm excited to see many of the speakers including screencaster extraordinaire Beth Kanter (I hope to get a quick video interview with Beth - any questions?) and community expert Tara Hunt. Chris Pirillo puts on a great event! If you're in the Seattle area, I'd love to meet up for coffee, beer or whatever your beverage of choice is.
TechSmith participates in several Tradeshows and Conferences every month. You can check out our Event Calendar here. Drop me an e-mail if you'd like to meet-up. We usually have several people ranging from Product Managers to Developers to Marketing and Sales attend each show. And, we'd love to meet-up to get your feedback. Maybe we can even meet to sing a round of Willie Nelson songs on Karaoke!?!
]]>When screencasting, it is good to have as little distraction in your video as possible. You want your viewers to focus on the topic at hand. One way to do this is to clean up your desktop or other areas you will be showing off. A little 'house-keeping' is good! I made a quick jingcast to show you how to clean up your desktop quickly in Vista (Note: I learned this option is available on XP too from Pierre and Owen. See comments below!). The video runs less than a minute.
Got a screencast tip to share? If so, I want to hear it! Or better yet, Jing it to me!
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This week's Screencast of the Week comes from Paul Nielsen - he is a SQL Server rockstar!
I like Paul's screencasts for several reasons. First of all, he includes his all of his tutorials in one handy place - in a MediaRoll. You can see his MediaRoll to the left or on his homepage here. It's nice to have all of his screencasts in one place and I can subscribe to an RSS feed so I am alerted whenever Paul adds a new one. I also like that one of Paul's screencasts is a recorded presentation. Even though I was unable to attend his presentation live, I can still watch it because he recorded it with Camtasia Studio.
Want to learn more about the MediaRoll? You can find a nice write-up about it complete with a tutorial video here on the Screencast.com blog.
Any nominations for next week's Screencast of the Week?
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Everyone wants a job that they love. Do you have one? If not, I may have found some options you might be interested in.
I was poking around online looking for information about Camtasia Studio and in my search came across several job openings for Camtasia Studio experts. You can find the jobs listed here. Thought I'd share this with everyone since I'm sure there are a few people who'd like to get paid to screencast full time! And, no, I'm not looking for a new job. I feel very fortunate to have a job that I love with great co-workers at a fantastic company that makes cool products! :-) Which brings up another point - TechSmith is hiring too! You can check out a list of job openings here.
]]>That question reminded me of a little known feature in SnagIt that I thought I'd share with you. Did you know that you can use SnagIt to capture from a Scanner or Camera? I often come across articles in magazines that I'd like to archive, share and save as a PDF. I can do that easily with SnagIt and a scanner! There is a tutorial on our Learning Center here. Or, if video is your thing, I did a quick Jing screencast to show you how to set up your capture (sorry, no audio. I did not have a microphone at home and the built in microphone just sounded way too bad). It's a short Jingcast that runs under a minute.
One of our forum moderators and PowerPoint MVP from Germany, Ute Simon, also shared, via Twitter, her tutorial about how to capture from a scanner. Her tutorial is in German, but the screenshots are in English. You can see Ute's tutorial here.
And, if you're on Twitter, feel free to jump in the conversation and add me as a friend! You can find my Twitter feed here.
]]>I've shown off speed painting videos before. Remember this great one of Jennifer Love Hewitt here?
If you'd like to make your own speed recording, here's how you speed up your Camtasia Studio screencast. When editing your screencast in Camtasia Studio, right click your video on the timeline. You should see the menu below.
Click on 'Clip Speed' and you can speed up or slow down your clip.
Any nominations for next week's Screenast of the Week?
]]>Matt Pierce, our Training Manager at TechSmith, picked this first topic about something the training team is commonly asked about. Matt made a screencast about creating a text box, in SnagIt, with a colored background. Matt also gives a tour of the Learning Center. The screencast runs a little over 3 minutes.
Here's where I need your help! In order to do these screencasts, we need your questions! So, post your 'viewer questions' in the comments and we'll create screencasts to answer a couple of your questions.
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Hey Blog Readers… I've got some insider news just for you! We've been working hard on a new product called Camtasia Relay. And, it's finally ready for beta testing.
So, what is Camtasia Relay? It is lecture and presentation capture for the masses - perfect for businesses and academia. Say you are a professor and you want to capture and share your lecture. Camtasia Relay makes it easy for you to do this - there is a simple recorder that's easy to use (see pic on the left). Step in the classroom or the boardroom, tell Camtasia Relay to record and deliver your presentation. After you're done recording, Camtasia Relay does all the work for you. You can automatically produce the recording into different formats, name the files and copy the files to different servers. There is an automated distribution system to share your recorded presentations easily.
This is TechSmith's first server-side offering. And, no new hardware is required - Camtasia Relay runs securely on your existing networks, Windows servers, PCs and Macs. The Camtasia Relay recorder runs on the local machine. It records full motion video so you capture exactly what happens during a lecture or presentation.
We've been eating our own dogfood and using Camtasia Relay internally at TechSmith. We've always had a mandatory Monday Morning Meeting for all staff at TechSmith. That's our time to get up to speed on company wide news and events. We've been using Camtasia Relay internally to record the Monday Morning Meeting. That way everyone knows what happened in the meeting. This is perfect for me as I often miss the meeting if I'm traveling. I no longer have to be out of the loop on any news or company wide discussions.
We're having a public beta. Sign-up starts today for 100 qualified people (you must have your own server). You can apply for the beta test here.
You can find more information about Camtaisa Relay here. And, you can watch an intro video and see Camtasia Relay in action here.
Rich Boys, the Product Manager for Camtasia Relay, sat down with me last week to explain what Camtasia Relay is, who it is for and how you can get in on the beta. The video runs about 3 minutes long.
Materials used to create this video:
* Sanyo Xacti HD1000 Camcorder * Dell Latitude D820 * QuickTime Pro * Camtasia Studio * Screencast.com for hostingStay tuned - we'll be doing regular screencasts and videos about Camtasia Relay!
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I try to have a pic or video in every blog post. We've talked in the past here about how the combination of words plus a visual is much more powerful than words alone.
So, it is no surprise that I use SnagIt or Jing for a graphic for every blog post. And, consequently, there are a few features I routinely use in the SnagIt Editor to create the screenshot for my posts - I almost always resize the screenshot to scale it down and I use the 'Save As' feature.
There's a little known feature in SnagIt Editor called the 'Quick Access Toolbar' that makes it really quick and easy to have access to your most frequently used tools and options. I used the Quick Access Toolbar to make buttons for the 'Save As' and 'Resize' options. Now I always have access to the options I use most often and it saves me time from having to go to different menu options in the ribbon.
It occurred to me that many of you might not know about the Quick Access Toolbar so I wanted to share it with you. You can find out more about the Quick Access Toolbar here complete with a screencast.
Do you have any SnagIt tips or tricks to share?
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After a few weeks on hiatus, I thought it was time to bring back the Screencast of the Week. I was digging through the TechSmith website and came across a cool story. What do you think your company would for you do if *you* saved them $20 million dollars? I think you'd be called a hero for starters. Roxio (you know, they make popular software like Easy Media Creator) is using Camtasia Studio to make online support videos and has saved millions of dollars in the process! I think that's worthly of hero status!
You can read more here about the cool things Roxio is doing with Camtasia Studio. And, you can click on the screenshot to the left to launch one of their support videos. I like it because the video is short and concise. And, they use Callouts and Zoom and Pan nicely.
Any nominations for next week's Screencast of the Week? Who else should have hero status?
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Break out the balloons and party hats! It's time to celebrate Jing's birthday! Hard to believe that it has already been a year since we started the testing the concept of the Jing Project! To celebrate, we're making Jing an official offering of TechSmith.
Don't worry, it's still free! And, as our thanks to all the Jing users, we're upgrading your complimentary Screencast.com account to 2GB of storage and 2GB of transfer bandwidth!
We still need your help with Jing - so keep the feedback coming. And, you can always find the latest news and interact with the Jing team on their blog here.
Tony Dunckel, the Jing Product Manager, sat down for a quick interview with me. We talked about the history of Jing to where we are today and what the future holds for Jing. It's a quick video running under 3:25 minutes.
Happy Birthday, Jing! I can't wait to see what happens between now and your 2nd birthday!
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Recently I asked for your help in filling out this survey about Camtasia Studio. I appreicate so many people taking the time to fill it out. In the end, you'll end up with a better product.
We had the Camtasia Studio annual survey translated to German. Hopefully this will make it easier for our German speaking customers to participate. You can find German survey here.
Thanks again! We appreciate it! Our products are better because of your input.
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Hardware:
* Sanyo Xacti HD1000 CamcorderSoftware:
* QuickTime Pro * Camtasia StudioBy the way, if you want to have fun in the office, just walk around with a video camera. It is interesting to see people's reactions - they either ham it up or they run quickly!
I hope to do more of these little behind the scenes videos with a variety of people at TechSmith in all departments. Do you have any requests or questions you'd like me ask our developers, designers, sales, tech support or ??? Let me be your roving reporter inside of TechSmith.
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