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!

As much as I love the computer, sometimes I need to step away from it. You know, to do things like go outside, read a book, go photowalking, hang out with my dog and family, sleep...

There's a little known feature in SnagIt that enables you to do screen captures whether you're at your computer or not! Set the capture timer on SnagIt and walk away - SnagIt will do the work for you capturing things like stock tickers, websites, software...whatever you like. You'll never miss the action on your computer again. There's a tutorial about it here. You can see some of the settings in the screenshot below.

Want to see this feature in action? Amit Agarwal from Digital Inspiration made a time-lapse video, made with SnagIt screen captures, showing how the website Techmeme homepage changed over 50 hours! His screencast is 50 seconds long. Check out the video and his blog write-up here. Amit also has a nice write-up about how he created the screencast here.

Do you think you'll try this feature? What will you capture?

Ever have one of the those days where you look up at the clock and the day is over? That's what happened to me yesterday. I was having so much fun in Chicago going to the Art Institute of Chicago (they have a great art exhibit on Edward Hopper and Winslow Homer, by the way), Millennium Park, walking on the Magnificent Mile, riding on the "L"...and, you see where I'm going. I ran out of time to post the Screencast of the Week yesterday. My apologies...

This week's Screencast of the Week comes from Dr. Brian Friedlander. Dr. Friedlander is using Jing to answer students questions! Recently one of his students was stuck on a software project and needed help. Instead of writing a long email with step by step instructions to answer his students questions, Dr. Frieedlander just made a quick screecast with Jing and emailed it to his student. His student got the individual attention she needed plus she not only got to hear what she needed to do, but she also got see what she needed to do.

You can read Dr. Friedlander's blog post about how he's using Jing in the classroom here. To see the screencast, click on the screenshot above. It is a short video that runs just over a minute long.

And, best of all, in addition to saving himself time, check out his student's response to his screencast!

What have you screencasted lately?

Growing up in Michigan, I have always been a hockey fan. I often went to watch games at Michigan State University and even played on a roller hockey team in college. And, if I couldn't attend a game, I would sometimes watch hockey on TV. I remember back in the early 90's Fox Television developed a special puck (FoxTrax) with internal electronics that would highlight the puck on the TV broadcast. That way viewers could easily see and track the puck on-screen. Sometimes it was hard to follow the action of small, fast moving puck on TV.

Just as the puck could be hard to track, the same is true for your cursor when screencasting. It can be hard on your viewers to follow your mouse movements. And, on some backgrounds, it may be nearly impossible to see your cursor. That's why I love this tutorial from video expert, Bill Myers! He'll show you how he makes his cursor big and red so his viewers can easily follow his activity. The video runs just 3 minutes long.

And, don't forget you can also highlight Camtasia Studio's cursor for added visibility. There is a tutorial here.

Thanks for sharing your tip with us, Bill!

As a frequent traveler, I often have problems remembering and organizing travel details. Hotels look the same, airports start to blur together, and cab rides are crazy in any city. What dates am I traveling? How am I getting there? Where am I?!

I also need to share my travel itinerary with my fellow team members, friends and family. Sometimes when I travel, other people are booking my information. I have little bits and pieces of my travel plans all over - email, airline and hotel websites, and even scraps of paper.

This week's Screencast of the Week comes from one of my favorite sites, TripIt. I quickly fell in love with TripIt for organizing my travel in one place and giving me a single, master itinerary. I can invite fellow travelers to my trip so we can meet-up on the road. I can colloborate with our Tradeshow Manager and she can add travel information which she books for me in my itinerary. And, I can easily share my info with others. TripIt makes my life easier. And, then when I saw they were using Camtasia Studio, I was really hooked!

You can see several TripIt screencasts here. I like these screencasts from TripIt because they are short, concise and the audio sounds great! They even make great use of a large arrow so you can easily follow their cursor and they do a fab job zooming and panning.

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

Chipmunks are cute, but that does not mean you necessarily want them in your videos.

Just wanted to give everyone a heads-up about an audio issue you may encounter. You might hear Camtasia Studio Flash content playing on the latest release of the Flash Player (v9.0.115.0 or later) where the audio sounds garbled and may contain a high pitched chirp that kind of sounds like, you guessed it, a chipmunk.

A future update from Adobe to the Flash Player may resolve this conflict, but in the meantime we have written a fix that will avoid this problem. You can find the fix included in the latest version of Camtasia Studio, which you can download here. Note: This is a free update if you have a license for Camtasia Studio 5.0.

The Camtasia Studio team and Tech Support have investigated this issue and found that it occurs when:

• The project was produced to SWF.

• The SWF file was produced with MP3 audio.

• The SWF file is played in the latest Flash Player.
  
  

  You can find out all the details on this issue, as well as obtain a tool to fix any video already produced with Camtasia that sounds garbled, here.

I'm happy to share some news with you - there is a new release of Camtasia Studio v5.1! This is a free upgrade if you have Camtasia Studio v5.0.

Here's a quick update of what's new:

Callouts, callout, callouts! We have lots of new updates for callouts. There is a new Spotlight callout that dims everything on the screen except for the part you want to emphasize. The new Highlighter callout is a bright, bold highlighter pen for the screen. Plus, add and edit callouts faster and easily.

Third audio track now available - we've added a third audio track on the timeline. This makes is easy to add background or other audio to your screencasts.

Create screencasts for the iPhone and iTouch easily - We've added a preset for the dimensions of the iPhone and iTouch so you can produce videos quickly that look great on these devices.

ExpressShow is now available for the Flash FLV format - FLV videos are typically longer and contain more motion or camera video. Now you can wrap FLV videos in the ExpressShow template. They'll look great with full-screen playback, a floating table of contents and custom "about" box.

Organize, share and present Flash videos with the updated Camtasia Theater - Want to share several Flash videos online together? Use Camtasia Theater to create a customizable Web menu for any of your Camtasia Studio-produced Flash videos. ExpressShow, SWF, and FLV. Use Camtasia Theater to create a table of contents which makes it easily jump between videos.

You can find out all the details here about the new version. For information about how to upgrade, please visit here.

What do you think? Do you like the new features?

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?

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?

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?

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?