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!

Every two years my extended family gets together for a family reunion in Northern Wisconsin or the Upper Pennisula of Michigan. Last weekend happened to be family reunion time. So, my parents, sister, my 2 year old nephew and I, all piled in a car and drove 12 hours to the reunion. And, yes, you read that right. 12 hours in a car with a 2 year old!

When catching up with family members, it inevitably came up that I worked at a software company. Now raise your hand if you're the one in your family that everyone comes to for tech support or computer questions? I'm that person too! Well, this weekend was no different. Everyone wanted some computer help. In the past, I would try to help out family members via phone or email which isn't always easy and everyone ended up frustrated. But, this year, I'm going to go the Jing route!

So, you can guess what I'll be doing over the next week. I've been given a laundry list of questions and I'll be making screencast answers with Jing. Here's part of my list of screencasts: how do I move my iTunes library, how do I organize my photos, how do I update my antivirus software, how do I... ? And the list goes on. Anyone else using Jing for tech support for their family? What's been their reaction?

And, I'm also compiling the family photos from the weekend into a video slideshow using Camtasia Studio. You can see how to create this here.

Mark your calendars - I just got word from Daniel Park at dappertext that he's being interviewed tomorrow on all things Camtasia Studio and dappertext by 'Views from the Coop'.

You can hear Daniel's interview live on Blog Talk Radio here tomorrow at 3pm EST, If you can't listen live, they usually post the podcast to their site here within about a week (usually). I can't wait to hear Daniel's tips and tricks. I always learn something new from him.

Daniel also has a new newsletter that is dedicated to screencasting. You can sign up for it here.

Today we're celebrating the Fourth of July in the United States. After a long day of celebrating with friends and family, I'm sitting on my porch watching some fireworks while my dog hides inside.

I snapped a few pics today and wanted to share them with others at the party. But, I wanted to 'dress' them up a little before sending. I figured I'd use some SnagIt stamps on them! I needed some SnagIt stamps that were holiday themed like flags and fireworks!

Lucky for me, I recently heard from author and PowerPoint MVP Geetesh Bajaj. I've blogged about him before, remember? And, Geetesh had exactly what I was looking for! Geetesh has started creating SnagIt stamps and is sharing them with everyone. You can find them here. And, he even has some stamps for the Fourth of July which you can find here. Perfect for what I was looking to add to my pics from today!

Need to know how to install stamps on SnagIt? Geetesh also has a great tutorial here that will help you.

And, Geetesh hopes to have hundreds more of these sets of SnagIt stamps available to you over time. So, be sure to bookmark Geetesh's website and keep checking it. If you like the SnagIt stamps, make sure you thank Geetesh and spread the word! I think it's very nice of him to share them!

Wow! Simply wow! You are the best! I cannot thank you enough for all the comments and feedback about SnagIt 9 that was left on the blog post here.

I wanted to let you know that Tony Dunckel, the SnagIt Product Manager, and the SnagIt team are reviewing all the comments you have left. We'll have a follow-up post shortly. But until then, keep the feedback coming! We're listening...

I need your help. Got 15 minutes to spare? Would you to help us make Camtasia Studio better? We're trying to make sure we put all the great feature requests we get in perspective. So, in order to better understand what you need, like and think about Camtasia Studio, the Product Manager, Troy Stein, created a 23 question survery.

The results are going straight to the Camtasia Studio team and Troy. You can find the survey here. Thanks for making Camtasia Studio better!

PowerPoint expert Geetesh Bajaj of Indezine and Scrapbook Presentations has been at it again! I just got word that he's added more free SnagIt stamps for you! He has stamps for Birthdays, Christmas, July 4th and Memorial Day that you can find here. I can't wait to see what stamps Geetesh adds next!

I've been thinking a lot about snow lately. Hard to imagine as the weather is great here in Michigan right now. But, we often work on projects several months in advance at TechSmith. So, even though it is July, we had a meeting about our yearly TechSmith holiday card the other day. And, that's what got me thinking about snow!

In the meeting we decided we wanted you to star in the holiday card! And, that's why I need your help! Please send me a pic, starring you, with something that represents or is meaningful to you from your favorite holiday. Maybe it's a picture of you holding that a homemade Valentine or you with that homemade pie for Pi Day! We're looking for holidays throughout the year that are celebrated around the world.

Here are the specs for the pics:

• Images that are at minimum 1600×1200, Smaller is ok
• Preferred formats would be png or Uncompressed jpeg

E-mail your pics to me. Please include in your email:

• Your name (title or job function and company if you'd like them included)
• Blog or website address
• What holiday you've chosen and why it is meaningful to you
• Which TechSmith products you use

I could use the pics by August 11 if possible. Don't worry - I'll probably nag you again when the deadline is closer. ;-) We'll use every pic that is sent to us either online or in print. They will all get used.

And, by the way, the cool pic in this post is from our 'unofficial' photographer at TechSmith - that's Kate Sumbler from Tech Support!

I recently got a new video camera and I wanted to put it to the test. Since we get a lot of questions about audio and how we record the audio for our videos, I figured this would be a good video to start with. I stopped by the Training department yesterday to record a little tour of our homemade sound booth with Matt Pierce, our Training Manager. The video runs just over 2:30 minutes. Matt will share why and how they made it, the materials they used, costs and some tricks they learned. It is not as hard or as expensive as you might think.

Materials used in this video:

Hardware:

Software:

By the way, if you want to have fun in the office, just walk around with a video camera. It is interesting to see people's reactions - they either ham it up or they run quickly!

I hope to do more of these little behind the scenes videos with a variety of people at TechSmith in all departments. Do you have any requests or questions you'd like me ask our developers, designers, sales, tech support or ??? Let me be your roving reporter inside of TechSmith.

Recently I asked for your help in filling out this survey about Camtasia Studio. I appreicate so many people taking the time to fill it out. In the end, you'll end up with a better product.

We had the Camtasia Studio annual survey translated to German. Hopefully this will make it easier for our German speaking customers to participate. You can find German survey here.

Thanks again! We appreciate it! Our products are better because of your input.

Break out the balloons and party hats! It's time to celebrate Jing's birthday! Hard to believe that it has already been a year since we started the testing the concept of the Jing Project! To celebrate, we're making Jing an official offering of TechSmith.

Don't worry, it's still free! And, as our thanks to all the Jing users, we're upgrading your complimentary Screencast.com account to 2GB of storage and 2GB of transfer bandwidth!

We still need your help with Jing - so keep the feedback coming. And, you can always find the latest news and interact with the Jing team on their blog here.

Tony Dunckel, the Jing Product Manager, sat down for a quick interview with me. We talked about the history of Jing to where we are today and what the future holds for Jing. It's a quick video running under 3:25 minutes.

Happy Birthday, Jing! I can't wait to see what happens between now and your 2nd birthday!

After a few weeks on hiatus, I thought it was time to bring back the Screencast of the Week. I was digging through the TechSmith website and came across a cool story. What do you think your company would for you do if you saved them $20 million dollars? I think you'd be called a hero for starters. Roxio (you know, they make popular software like Easy Media Creator) is using Camtasia Studio to make online support videos and has saved millions of dollars in the process! I think that's worthly of hero status!

You can read more here about the cool things Roxio is doing with Camtasia Studio. And, you can click on the screenshot to the left to launch one of their support videos. I like it because the video is short and concise. And, they use Callouts and Zoom and Pan nicely.

Any nominations for next week's Screencast of the Week? Who else should have hero status?

I try to have a pic or video in every blog post. We've talked in the past here about how the combination of words plus a visual is much more powerful than words alone.

So, it is no surprise that I use SnagIt or Jing for a graphic for every blog post. And, consequently, there are a few features I routinely use in the SnagIt Editor to create the screenshot for my posts - I almost always resize the screenshot to scale it down and I use the 'Save As' feature.

There's a little known feature in SnagIt Editor called the 'Quick Access Toolbar' that makes it really quick and easy to have access to your most frequently used tools and options. I used the Quick Access Toolbar to make buttons for the 'Save As' and 'Resize' options. Now I always have access to the options I use most often and it saves me time from having to go to different menu options in the ribbon.

It occurred to me that many of you might not know about the Quick Access Toolbar so I wanted to share it with you. You can find out more about the Quick Access Toolbar here complete with a screencast.

Do you have any SnagIt tips or tricks to share?

Hey Blog Readers… I've got some insider news just for you! We've been working hard on a new product called Camtasia Relay. And, it's finally ready for beta testing.

So, what is Camtasia Relay? It is lecture and presentation capture for the masses - perfect for businesses and academia. Say you are a professor and you want to capture and share your lecture. Camtasia Relay makes it easy for you to do this - there is a simple recorder that's easy to use (see pic on the left). Step in the classroom or the boardroom, tell Camtasia Relay to record and deliver your presentation. After you're done recording, Camtasia Relay does all the work for you. You can automatically produce the recording into different formats, name the files and copy the files to different servers. There is an automated distribution system to share your recorded presentations easily.

This is TechSmith's first server-side offering. And, no new hardware is required - Camtasia Relay runs securely on your existing networks, Windows servers, PCs and Macs. The Camtasia Relay recorder runs on the local machine. It records full motion video so you capture exactly what happens during a lecture or presentation.

We've been eating our own dogfood and using Camtasia Relay internally at TechSmith. We've always had a mandatory Monday Morning Meeting for all staff at TechSmith. That's our time to get up to speed on company wide news and events. We've been using Camtasia Relay internally to record the Monday Morning Meeting. That way everyone knows what happened in the meeting. This is perfect for me as I often miss the meeting if I'm traveling. I no longer have to be out of the loop on any news or company wide discussions.

We're having a public beta. Sign-up starts today for 100 qualified people (you must have your own server). You can apply for the beta test here.

You can find more information about Camtaisa Relay here. And, you can watch an intro video and see Camtasia Relay in action here.

Rich Boys, the Product Manager for Camtasia Relay, sat down with me last week to explain what Camtasia Relay is, who it is for and how you can get in on the beta. The video runs about 3 minutes long.

Materials used to create this video:

Stay tuned - we'll be doing regular screencasts and videos about Camtasia Relay!