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Have you ever been to an event only to see a presentation break down and fail due to technical problems? It's not fun to watch and it's not fun to be the presenter.

The other day, this tweet caught my eye on Twitter.

I had to hear this story! I contacted Nick Beaugeard and he shared with me how he used Camtasia Studio to save the day at Microsoft TechEd. I asked him to do a guest blog post. And, here's what Nick shared with me in his own words:

For about four years now (I've been presenting at Teched's worldwide since 2001), I decided to record all of my product demonstrations using Camtasia. I reached the conclusion that Teched is primarily a learning event and the attendees want to understand the products on show and how they work, not how good a nervous presenter is at performing live demonstrations.

It used to be simple; a couple of virtual machines and most demos would be cool, but now to demonstrate most enterprise products, you need quite a significant infrastructure to perform a demonstration of any quality and value. Most of us know how absolutely awful the "internet" connection is at conference venues, so having a "belt and braces approach" seemed to be the way to go.

The first time I recorded my demos, I pretended to perform the demonstration, and as if by magic they all worked perfectly. By the end of that session, I plucked up the courage to walk away from my laptop and let the "live demo" continue while I described to the audience exactly what was going on.

Despite the initial surprise, I asked members of the Audience what they thought, and they loved it. My hypothesis about the value of a truly live demo was borne out. From that day, every demo I do, whether to customers or on stage is pre-recorded with Camtasta. No-one can tell the difference (what a fantastic codec you have!)

Anyway at Teched 08 South Africa, I was once again scheduled to deliver a level 400 (the most technical) session at 10am on the last day of the conference (you know, the one after the huge closing party). My session was all about developing management packs for System Center Operations Manager 2007 to manage disparate environments. Because it was such a technical session, I was planning to ask the audience for examples of things they needed to manage and using an instance of SCOM, demonstrate live how to implement the solution.

Three hours before the presentation, and a little hung over, I grabbed my demo machine and headed to the speaker's lounge to prepare. To my absolute consternation, the display on my laptop had failed (horribly) so there was no way I could work on my demo environment.

So, and here's the trick... There were no spare machines for the time of my presentation save a lowly Windows Vista workstation basically to show slides and some videos. It certainly could not have hosted my huge virtual machines. To save the day, I "borrowed" a collegues laptop, used terminal services via VPN to my machine back at the office in Sydney.

I then ran up Camtasia Studio (remotely), and recorded six or seven demonstrations of various management pack scenarios. After producing them in the right size for Powerpoint (I find 1024×768 WMV works best), I put the videos embedded in my presentation and placed the entire deck on my FTP server.

I got access to the room one hour prior to my session, and kicked off ftp. First the PowerPoint, then the demo videos in order of presentation. Funnily Internet from South Africa to Sydney is appalling, so by the time I started my session, only 75% of the videos had downloaded.

Taking my heart in my hands I started delivering the presentation. Luckily the videos downloaded and completed in the background!

The audience never new that

a) I didn't really have a real demo
b) I had no demo 3 hours before
c) My demo laptop was terminal

Funnily that session rated the highest session at Teched South Africa last year, and Camtasia saved the day!

Now whenever I see a demo failing for someone, I take them aside quietly and describe my story. Maybe one day all demos will be pre-recorded and attendees can actually get value from the information, rather than distracting, failing demos!

Nick Beaugeard is an ex-microsoftee serial entrepreneur, and has worked for companys way to numerous to mention. He's currently CEO of HubOne a startup delivering enterprise windows software.