The Visual Lounge lets you find out about TechSmith behind-the-scenes. Watch screencasts and videos from other customers, meet up with your fellow TechSmith users and staff, and get more tips and tricks!

I think you already know that I love SnagIt. But, I want to know if you do. Actually, I want to see if you do! We're including some photos of SnagIt users in an upcoming marketing piece and we need your help! If you have a few minutes to spare, please send us a photo with yourself holding a sign as shown below.

Details:

• You can stand in front of a plain wall or something more interesting. We'll crop out most of the background.

• Leave your photo at full size when you send it. We'll scale it down. If it must be reduced, shrink it to 800 × 600.

• Email your pics and photo release form (download PDF here) to our Newsletter Editor, Daniel Foster at newsletter@techsmith.com.

• Deadline for pics is Wednesday, May 14, 2008.

• Smile, smile, smile!

Need some inspiration? Check out the video below! Kate Sumbler, from Tech Support, was our roving photographer at TechSmith today and snapped some sample pics to inspire you. I included Kate's pictures from TechSmith along with some pics we received from SnagIt fans in the video. I had a lot of fun making video - I hope you enjoy it!

You can see the pics we have so far here.

Note about the photo release file: If you have the full Adobe Acrobat, you can fill in the boxes, save the PDF, and attach it to an email. If you have Acrobat Reader, you can fill in the boxes, Snag the whole page (scrolling window capture works great for this) and send me the image.

I was honored enough to meet the wonderful Beth Kanter in person at SXSW this year. You remember Beth from these blog posts, right? Beth is a screencaster extraordinaire! Troy Stein was able to meet up with Beth on his travels in Boston recently. Here's what Troy has to say about his meeting with Beth:

Met with Beth Kanter in her home in Massachussets. Beth was running between her workout and the airport and was gracious enough to spend some time with me.

Beth makes tutorials and training for non-profits. In the past, she's made some really fancy training videos with Camtasia. One project was 12 minutes long, but took 20+ hours to complete, including storyboarding, recording, and especially edit.

Lately, Beth has been using Jing to do more improvised recordings. She says that she'll do a quick dry-run before she starts the recording, then she'll record it with Jing.

She said that it was liberating to create something so quickly and easily. But, she often wants to edit her Jing recordings.

Beth also said, "I don't mind re-recording a Jing if its a minute or two long. But, when I screw up in the third or fourth minute, it can be really frustrating. Don't get me wrong, I get frustrated when I mess up using the Camtasia Recorder, too. But the pain is lessened by knowing I can edit my Camtasia recordings. But I can't edit my Jings."

Is that an issue for anyone else?

Would it be helpful to edit Jing recordings inside Camtasia?

What can you do in 20 hours? Could you develop and deliver a product? Well, several developers did just that the other day. And, they made screencasts demoing what they made! So, with that in mind, several screencasts share the title of 'Screencast of the Week' this week!

Recently Telligent Systems hosted a Community Server Hack-A-Thon (HAT) event to show off their new web services API. The challenge was simple - developers had 20 hours to develop and deliver a product! And, even though I could not attend the event, I'm still able to see the highlights since they used Jing to make screencasts of the top ranked submissions.

You can see the details of the event along with the screencast demos of the top ranked submissions here. It's exciting to see what people can develop in less than 24 hours!

Big thanks to Scott Watermasyk who alerted me via Twitter about the videos!

Any nominations for next week Screencast of the Week?

Troy Stein, the Camtasia Studio Product Manager, is out loose on the road! He'll be making his way around North America over the next few weeks stopping to chat with Camtasia Studio users. He's starting on the East Coast of the United States. If you'd like to give Troy your feedback directly, drop us a line either in the comments or via e-mail and he may be coming to your town soon.

Here are Troy's notes from one of his meetings...

I met with Anthony Rocha in New Hampshire. Anthony runs Blade Multimedia, a full-scale multimedia development shop. He kept mentioning in his "pipeline" -- the various applications he uses to create his rich websites, CDs, etc. Anthony uses a lot of software applications in his multimedia projects, in conjunction with Camtasia. Here's how he decribes his pipeline of applications and some of the workflow (3min video):

Below is his list of apps in his pipeline. What's in yours? What do you use in conjunction with CS?

Me? Tonight, I used a Sony HDV camera, digitzed it with iMovie (for some reason Final Cut didn't like me today). I exported from iMovie to QuickTime MOV and imported it into a prototype of CS for editing, marking and production. Why not just edit in iMovie or FCP? I'm making a longer video of the interview and want the ability to create a TOC for easier navigation. If there's a good way of creating an html TOC w/ embedded MOV file in iMovie or FCP, let me know.

Anthony's Pipeline of Applications:

Animation 3D & 2D:

. 3DS Max
. Silo
. Motion Builder
. SWiSHMax
. Flash
. Swift3D

Graphics Design

. Fireworks
. Photoshop
. Digital Audio production
. Cakewalk Sonar Producer
. Cakewalk PRO Tracks
. Groove monkee midi libraries
. VSampler
. WaveLab
. dbpowerAMp Encoder

Video editing and encoding (& screen capturing):

. Camtasia Studio v5
. SWiSHVideo
. Adobe Flash Video Encoder
. Sorenson Squeeze
. MediaCoder
. SUPER

Web Design:

. Dream Weaver
. Source Edit
. Notepad
. XAMPP local server for site testing.

Rich Application Development:

. MDM zinc 3
. Amayeta swf encrypt
. Axialis Icon Workshop
. Astrum Install wizard

I'm having a great time in Paris this week! When I'm not stuck inside at a conference, I've been a tourist and snapping lots of pics.

I also have a habit of changing my laptop's wallpaper frequently. I'd like to use a few of my photos from Paris for wallpaper so I can remember my trip long after I've returned home to Michigan. TabletPC MVP Craig Pringle recently wrote an article about how he creates wallpaper that works in both portrait and landscape mode and he used SnagIt as part of the process. Craig used SnagIt to change one of his pictures to grayscale which looked great! So, I thought I'd try the same thing! Here's Craig's article on GottaBeMobile.

I also made a quick Jing screencast that runs less than 20 seconds to show you how to change your pic to grayscale. Click on the video below to watch.

Note: TechSmith is one of GottaBeMobile's sponsors.

I don't know about you, but whenever I travel somewhere and I'm not a native speaker, I always end up thinking about usability. When you're not able to read or understand what people are saying to you, you better hope they've put some thought into usability with whatever you're interacting with.

Take for instance the task of purchasing train tickets or even using an elevator. Even these routine tasks can be difficult tasks unless someone takes into consideration that a user may not be able to read or hear the instructions. Hopefully they have observed someone interacting with the machine. It can be pretty frustrating sometimes, but I'm always amazed at the kindness of strangers (and grateful too)!

And, on that note, I am in Paris this week for a conference and to meet-up with anyone who uses Camtasia Studio, SnagIt, Jing, Morae, and UserVue. And, yes, I had to buy a ticket to the Paris Metro off a machine like the one pictured to the above. And, no, I did not see an English option, but I managed to get my ticket nonetheless. :-)

So, with that in mind, this week's Screencast of the Week is about usability. It's done by Todd Follansbee of Web Marketing Resources. He made the video with Camtasia Studio but the testing was shot using Morae. Click the pic to the left to see Todd's video about website usablity. It's a quick one that runs less than 3 minutes.

If you're in Paris and would like to meet-up, please feel free to e-mail, call or text me (+1.517.410.0030). I'd love to meet-up!

I just learned that it's Videoblogging Week- April 20 - 28! It's not too late to celebrate. And, even though the organizers are talking about videos made with a camera, I think a screencast counts too. Afterall, you can easily record your screencast in Camtasia Studio complete with camera video combined with screen video together. There is a tutorial about how to do that here.

Judging on how my week is going so far, I probably won't have time to make a screencast a day to celebrate Videoblogging Week, but on my list for screencasts this week is one about creating iPod or iPhone videos with Camtasia Studio. But, I'm open to requests. What would you like to see?

There is a wiki full of info about Videoblogging Week which you can find here. Are you going to celebrate Videoblogging Week?

Don't you love it when someone figures out a great trick and then shares that knowledge? This week's Screencast of the Week does just that! It comes from Alec Couros, a Professor at the University of Regina. He's done a Jing screencast with step by step instructions about setting up sub Gmail accounts for all of his students. After a little research, he was able to figure out how to do this and made a great Jing screencast to share it. The screencast runs just over 3 minutes. You can click the screenshot on the left to watch it.

And, I learned about this screencast from a post referencing Alec Couros on Twitter! If you're on Twitter feel free to add me as a friend - @betsyweber. I have also set up a Twitter feed for @techsmith for TechSmith news.

Any nominations for next week's Screencast of the Week?

A little background music goes a long way and can set the tone and personality of your screencast. It can also make your screencast feel polished and professional. I get several questions about where we get the music for some of our screencasts. So, I thought I'd do a music round-up to share some sources we've found.

One option is to create your own music. I've used Cinescore and ACID Pro from Sony Creative Software. If you don't feel like composing from scratch, you can get some samples, loops and themes from Sony to help you create your masterpiece.

Creative Commons is also a great source music which you can search here. You can also try ccMixter for music that is free to download, remix and sample.

We use royalty free music that we purchase from Digital Juice often. The nice thing about Digital Juice is that most of their tracks are stackable which means you can pull out individual audio elements. So, if you find a track you really like but dislike part of it, you can just remove it.

DigitalJuice has a 10 second, 15 second, 30 second, 1 minute and a 3 minute version of each song. Here’s a quick screencast about how to get to the galleries to listen to their samples. It runs less than a minute long.

The Camtaisa Studio Product Manager, Troy Stein, has compiled a list of his favorite music clips from Digital Juice’s Stack Traxx. Here are Troy's favorites (the number represents the Volume Number):

• 04 RiverFlow (upbeat, fun)
• 06 ComeAndPlay (upbeat, little techno)
• 15 Mystique (lighter, subtle)
• 15 KickItBack (moderately upbeat guitar)
• 06 LookInside (un pocito espanol)
• 12 Letter of Intent (blue suit feel)
• 32 EstaBien (fun latin groove)
• 03 Magic (playful orchestra music)
• 37 Westcoast Vamp -- (bit of Jazz)
• 13 RadioActive -- (more of a driving, rockish sound)

Chris McQueen in Training used royalty free music for the Jing videos from Kevin Macleod at Incompetech.

What music sources have you found?

Meet Gudrun Cruz (pictured left). She's been busy, busy, busy. She does a variety of things at TechSmith and one of them being German Tech Support.

Gudrun has been busy writing over 60 articles for the top issues and questions from German customers. She has written articles ranging from "how to snag images from SnagIt itself", or "how to find the optimal frame rate in Camtasia Studio" to "error messages during installation and how to deal with them".

You can find the articles, written in German, here. You can also contact Tech Support directly from there and you can keep your own selection of questions and answers saved for later reference. Gudrun will continue to add answers to the database. And, best of all, you can use this resource 24/7.

What else would make your life easier and be helpful for you when you use our products?