WBT Development Part 3 Audio Recording

Please refer to Part 1 of this series for an overview and context of this post.

OK, so I've received the scripts and the PowerPoints, which include case studies and quizzes. (I altered the PowerPoint slightly for purposes here, the actual PowerPoint has the quiz answers identified, and I removed them here.) I'm using Camtasia to perform the recording and rendering, so keep that in mind because the methods may change depending on the application or applications you are using to accomplish the task.

My false start in this procedure was to try to record both the audio and video at the same time. This would have made editing a breeze but I found that when I recorded both concurrently the audio quality was terrible. The reason for this is because when Camtasia records both audio and video at the same time the audio is recorded as an MP3, which is a somewhat low-quality audio recording. But then when you go to render the project it samples it down to even lower quality levels. As such when I made my first attempt, I found the audio to be so bad that I couldn't stand it.

So I went back to the drawing board. I played with different microphones and different computers. I'm using the Logitech Premium Notebook Headset. I think that it provides good quality for this type of content. I recorded at work, at home, I found really quiet offices. No matter what, I was still suffering from really poor audio quality. Then I focused on just recording the audio separate and apart from the video.

That was the trick. When you record the audio separate from the video you can save it as a Wave. This means that the audio file will not be compressed and will not have any degradation in quality.

Keep in mind though, in the final product we can't tolerate having the audio component be so big. It would make the overall production so large that it would take so long to load that people would just leave. But at this stage of the game it is OK to have a large file. We'll compress everything together when we go to the rendering process.

So for me, this was the first big step in the production process was to take all of the scripts, read them out and save the audio as wave files.

An important thing to note here for people attempting this for the first time, some of these are like 50 minutes. It is not reasonable to think that you will be able to record your audio for 50 minutes straight without any mistakes. I made literally hundreds of mistakes. Whenever I flubbed a word, I would go back to the beginning of the paragraph and start again while the recording was still rolling. I removed all the flubbed paragraphs during the editing process.