Camtasia

No, it is not the title of a new (or old) Disney film. It is a software product that I received a couple weeks ago that helps you to make lightweight videos like what you see on Youtube. I love it.

Quite simply, it is going to change everything. Training; do we ever really have a budget for training? With Camtasia, who cares? You don't need a training budget, just a half day. I am able to put a quality video together in just a few minutes. It is especially good for the type of training I need to deploy; here is a new system, now use it.

Reviewing and testing functionality is now simple because I can create a video of the functionality under review and the team can watch it to gain familiarity with the software even before they start testing. Also, some of the people on my team don't know how to use Sharepoint. Because making a video is so easy, I spent about 10 minutes and made a Windows Media Player video that showed them how to save, check out, load back in and check back in files. But Shhhh! Don't tell them. They think that I worked really hard to develop it.

Now I have been making training videos for quite a while. PowerPoint has a lot of capabilities built right into it. But the files can get really big, and it doesn't handle video very well. Flash is a great tool, but you need to be a developer to master the interface. All I want to do is meet the pressing need of the day.

Camtasia has native plug-ins for PowerPoint and allows you to import right in. It also has this feature called "Smart Focus" which is cool because it allows you to have a fairly low resultution video that zooms in to specific areas of content. It literally zooms in on your mouse or cursor when you let it hover for a moment or start typing. Finally you can edit video and audio separately to make tweaks and adjustments.

LOVE LOVE LOVE.