The right tools for the job: A cautionary tale
The first tutorial videos I ever made were created with Camtasia. The videos were very easy to make, came out straightforwardly simple, but were really quite lovely. I had a nifty little macbook with a surprisingly good microphone built-in, so I was able to record voiceover without much fuss.
Fast forward about five years, when I tried to make something similar with Captivate. The result was a whole lot of NO. While Captivate does have a nice capability for zooming in, the primary reason Captivate is terrible for recording screencast is because you cannot speed up or slow down the recordings at all. This is a dealbreaker for those times when you recorded someone typing stuff into a field, and watching the s l o w typing is worse than watching paint dry. The inability to slow down/speed up the recording is a dealbreaker for a number of reasons, actually, but the typing thing is probably the most egregious.
Thus, after using Captivate to record a SME doing a bunch of stuff in a particular software application, I got frustrated with the slow typing thing and hit on the bright idea to convert my vids to mp4s and then edit them in Premiere Pro instead.
Long story short, the reason this was horrible is because in Premiere Pro, if you want to zoom in on your screen AND have anything highlighted with, say, a red box? You have to *animate* the red box to zoom in with the screen. It cannot be overstated how much time this takes.
Also: every time you edit a video, you have to watch it back to see if your edits look good. The time spent watching the video back adds up. And up. And up. And up. Every time you make more than just a few edits, you ultimately have to watch the entire video to make sure it flows correctly. This can amount to hours of your life.
Another problem was that the zooms I had already done in the Captivate vid could no longer be edited, because they were "built in" to the mp4, so to speak. They also looked "weird" compared to the zooms I made in Premiere, which usually came off a bit jerky, and the red callout boxes would dance around slightly as they failed to perfectly match up with the screen zooms.
I googled and googled and googled to try to find some other means of zooming in with those callouts, but never turned up anything.
I may have done a bad job explaining what I mean about needing to animate your callouts in Premiere Pro, but if I start talking about it in any more depth I may begin to experience flashbacks, and then I will begin to weep.
Later, it became apparent that I needed some kind of a "wrapper" for the whole thing, because my workplace didn't have the ability to post SCORM stuff, for reasons that I am not at liberty to explain. Actually, I never understood why, so instead of being opaque about it I'll just go ahead and admit that I didn't understand why.
The "wrapper" I chose was InDesign. You know what, this story is convoluted and boring. The entire ordeal was tedious and stressful, though I did learn lots of interesting stuff about what InDesign can do, ultimately it was needlessly complicated.
I lost so much sleep and sanity over that project. In retrospect, it should have been a software simulation in Captivate. It would have taken approximately 1/8 the amount of time and effort, but I had gotten it stuck in my head from day one that I wanted it to be a screencast video, and it was literally months later that I realized I had chosen the wrong output.
In other words: make sure you have the right tools for the job before you get any big ideas about what kinds of outputs you want to create.
The end!
Fast forward about five years, when I tried to make something similar with Captivate. The result was a whole lot of NO. While Captivate does have a nice capability for zooming in, the primary reason Captivate is terrible for recording screencast is because you cannot speed up or slow down the recordings at all. This is a dealbreaker for those times when you recorded someone typing stuff into a field, and watching the s l o w typing is worse than watching paint dry. The inability to slow down/speed up the recording is a dealbreaker for a number of reasons, actually, but the typing thing is probably the most egregious.
Thus, after using Captivate to record a SME doing a bunch of stuff in a particular software application, I got frustrated with the slow typing thing and hit on the bright idea to convert my vids to mp4s and then edit them in Premiere Pro instead.
Long story short, the reason this was horrible is because in Premiere Pro, if you want to zoom in on your screen AND have anything highlighted with, say, a red box? You have to *animate* the red box to zoom in with the screen. It cannot be overstated how much time this takes.
Also: every time you edit a video, you have to watch it back to see if your edits look good. The time spent watching the video back adds up. And up. And up. And up. Every time you make more than just a few edits, you ultimately have to watch the entire video to make sure it flows correctly. This can amount to hours of your life.
Another problem was that the zooms I had already done in the Captivate vid could no longer be edited, because they were "built in" to the mp4, so to speak. They also looked "weird" compared to the zooms I made in Premiere, which usually came off a bit jerky, and the red callout boxes would dance around slightly as they failed to perfectly match up with the screen zooms.
I googled and googled and googled to try to find some other means of zooming in with those callouts, but never turned up anything.
I may have done a bad job explaining what I mean about needing to animate your callouts in Premiere Pro, but if I start talking about it in any more depth I may begin to experience flashbacks, and then I will begin to weep.
Later, it became apparent that I needed some kind of a "wrapper" for the whole thing, because my workplace didn't have the ability to post SCORM stuff, for reasons that I am not at liberty to explain. Actually, I never understood why, so instead of being opaque about it I'll just go ahead and admit that I didn't understand why.
The "wrapper" I chose was InDesign. You know what, this story is convoluted and boring. The entire ordeal was tedious and stressful, though I did learn lots of interesting stuff about what InDesign can do, ultimately it was needlessly complicated.
I lost so much sleep and sanity over that project. In retrospect, it should have been a software simulation in Captivate. It would have taken approximately 1/8 the amount of time and effort, but I had gotten it stuck in my head from day one that I wanted it to be a screencast video, and it was literally months later that I realized I had chosen the wrong output.
In other words: make sure you have the right tools for the job before you get any big ideas about what kinds of outputs you want to create.
The end!
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