Powerpoint has a lot of great features that will help your videos stand out, such as animation, transitions, themes and design tools. This program will also help you organize your script and then turn this into slides.

You can create slides in PowerPoint and then marry them to screencasts that you have recorded in Camtasia. This way you can explain or give an overview and then show the details. The process is basically as follows:

• Record screencasts
• Create a presentation in PowerPoint
• Choose template or create your own
• Build slide outline and then slide deck
• Format your presentation, add transitions  and animations if desired
• Record presentation
• Open recording in Camtasia
• Split presentation where you want to add screecast recordings
• Drop screencasts into timeline where you want them

We have a detailed video clip from one of our weekly Q&A sessions that will show how this process works.

Try it for yourself and your screencasts will live happily ever after!

“I wanted to share some exciting news! As of yesterday I was offered a Principal position with Florida Virtual Schools….one of the fastest growing virtual school providers in the world! My pay just increased from $40,770 to $70,000 plus benefits! The reason I share this with you is because I truly feel that my knowledge and experience with Camtasia played a role in my hiring.

The interview process was rigorous with 4 interviews including a final interview with the CEO herself. I was chosen partly due to my education training, background, and experience, but also thanks to my Camtasia expertise, Twitter knowledge, and Facebook know-how. Maybe a good message for your students as this is a good lesson as to how building your Camtasia knowledge can benefit you in more ways than one! I will be diving into the Camtasia training full steam soon as it will REALLY benefit me (more than ever) in my new job! Thanks for all you do and the great content you provide!!!”

Links from this interview

http://bit.ly/lonrocks (local business landing page)

http://bit.ly/killermarketing (local business video sales page….this has three examples of videos from Lon’s Killer Camtasia Video template.

http://bit.ly/cIFuTg Kevin’s Twitter account being recognized as a top parent Twittering account. I think it is the 3rd or 4th click.

http://twitter.com/mrasworld- Kevin’s Twitter Account

Hope to see you in one of our courses too!

Generally, a storyboard for eLearning is a document that specifies the visual elements, text elements, audio elements, interactions and branching (where the system or user will go next) of every screen in an online course. Many people also add the learning objectives to the storyboard.

Storyboarding is typically part of the Development Phase. Start after you’ve done Analysis and Design. In the rapid development approach, however, you may start to storyboard as you are designing.

If you are part of a development team, the storyboard specifies what the graphic designer will create, what the illustrator will draw, what the narrator will say and the interactions that the programmer will produce. The storyboard is usually reviewed by the subject matter expert and your client. It’s the central document of eLearning development.

I prefer a visual approach to storyboarding, so I’ll describe this type of format. Some prefer storyboarding in all text, which may be quicker but may not be as informative. Off the top of my head, I can think of four main ways to go about creating a visual storyboard.

Four Ways to Create a Storyboard

1. Create a template in Word (in landscape mode) and let each page represent one screen. 

2. Create a template in PowerPoint and let each slide represent one screen.

3. Create a template in a commercial storyboarding application. There are many of these.

4. For the rapid development approach, begin writing the course directly in the authoring tool, such as PowerPoint.  In PowerPoint, you can write the script and other notes in the Notes section below the slide. This integrates storyboarding with actual development.

If you are using Word, just create an area for the storyboard title. Then create the following labeled boxes or regions in your template: 1) a box to represent the screen number in your numbering scheme, 2) a box to represent the screen itself, meaning the visual components of the course, 3) an area for the on-screen text (this can be combined with #2, 4) an area for the audio, 5) an area for the interactions and 6) an area to describe branching. Some people add an area for miscellaneous notes, learning objectives and also for reviewer comments.

Storyboard Template Fields

Fill in the template as follows: 

• Title Area: Add the unit, module, lesson or topic name.

• Screen Number Area: Enter a unique identifier for each screen. Something like “m1l2s3? for module 1, lesson 2, screen3.

• Visual Area: Describe in words, sketch or show the visual, such as the graphic, video clip, etc. You can include the text that will be on the screen or make another area for text.

• Audio Area: Write out the script, the name of a music file and the sound effects that will play on each screen. If you want to be really cool, use the acronym SFX for sound effects.

• Interaction Area: Describe the interactions that occur on each screen. Take advantage of the medium and provide lots of activities. Specifying these can be tricky and it often helps to write it out in the logic of programming. For example, “If button 1 is clicked, go to screen m1l24″ or “If choice 1 is dragged to correct target, display this response.”

• Branching Area: Define all the system branching that might occur. Branching differs from interactions, as it refers to navigating the whole system. There are standard navigation events, such as Next and Back, as well as more complex branching, such as what happens as a result of a user interaction. For example, you will need to define what happens when a user fails a self-check, clicks on a hyperlinked term or opts to retake a test.

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An essential talent for storyboarding one page per screen is squeezing in everything you need. What we really need is a three dimensional storyboard space. Scientists are working on that as we speak.

Here’s a basic storyboard template you can use and modify to include the areas above that suit your needs.

We have lots more templates you can use inside the Learn Camtasia course.

Check out Todd’s "Crappy Sample" here:

Crappy Sample!

Pretty serious lookin’ dude, eh? Ya… serious about making better videos!

Here’s my tip and tutorial to help Todd out:

CLICK to Watch
Duration: 12 minutes

A little bit of an advanced technique but if you’re handy with software and have some creativity, you can do some really sweet stuff!

New Camtasia 7 Callouts

Adding callouts to your videos is always a quick & easy way to add visual interest or emphasis to a talking point.

Camtasia 7 has some new callout styles and, even cooler, something called sketch motion callouts. These are “animated” callouts you can drop in that will “draw” themselves into the video.

Nice…

Camtasia 7 Cursor Effects

In Camtasia version 7 you will be able to help your viewer follow along better by editing the mouse pointer to enlarge it, creating a spotlight, and visual “clicks”.

“But Lon…we could do that in Camtasia 6!”

Ya…but not on the fly during the editing process! Ya.

Plus…there are new and much cooler effects (a spotlight and better looking “click” highlights) and a Cursor Track added to the timeline for more control over the effects.

Stay tuned!

Lon

In case you missed it, here it is again:

Me? I saw a brilliant video…almost a work of art. The combination of imagery, perfect music, and use of screen capture “scenes” put together into a 60 second collage was awesome.

But when it was over, I immediately thought, “Whoa! I could do THAT!”

Since I’m speaking at Bob “The Teacher” Jenkins S.I.M.P.L.E. Event this month, I put together my own little “search story”. Here it is:

[Click to Watch]

The really sweet part? I don’t have to pay $3 million bucks to air it! Actually, this clip is WAYYYY long because I couldn’t resist putting in the Cape Fear clip, so the 3 1/2 minute video would cost $10.5 million during that TV time slot.

The biggest concept to understand if you want to make one of these yourself is that it’s made up of individual “scenes” captured with Camtasia individually and then stitched together during editing.

If you tried to just grab ALL the footage in one recording shot? Hmmm…that would be VERY messy and you would never end up with anything that looked smooth. The biggest problem is that most of the scenes are “sped up” to give that cool fast typing effect.

I tried using Camtasia’s Clip Speed feature for this at first but since you can’t see the effects of the speed up until AFTER you produce, it was a TOTAL nightmare (come on Techsmith!! Uggg…).

I gave up and dropped the clips into Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum where the whole thing was a complete snap and I could monitor the timing and tweaks in real time.

Syncing the music, sounds, and other audio was also a breeze in Vegas.

I exported to a AVI file and did the Pan & Zooms in Camtasia (which is easier than Vegas to me), and rendered it out to MP4 Flash.

These kinds of videos aren’t new. They are called Search Stories and you can see other examples on this YouTube Channel.

A big thanks to Andy Jenkins (The Video Boss) for his blog post that gave me the inspiration and motivation to whip this out.

BTW…it took me about 7.5 hours, start to finish. Planning (as usual) took the biggest percentage of time (about 3.5 hours), setting up my “shots” and rehearsal about 2 hours, and the rest in editing and final production.

What do you think?

Lon Naylor

Picnik will allow you to:

• crop
• resize
• rotate
• touch up
• adjust lighting

Best of all, it’s free! No registration is required. It works for both Mac and PC.