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This week's Time Saver Tuesday comes from Nick Kwiatkowski! Nick's been using Camtasia Studio to record a live event in Lansing, Michigan called IgniteLansing. Ignite was started by O'Reilly and is an evening of 5-minute speed presentations about anything from Fighting Dirty in Scrabble to Clunkers for Cash and everything in between. These events are done around the world and run by local volunteers. Camtasia works great to capture these one time events for archive. Enjoy Nick's Time Saver Tuesday!

One of my side projects that I've been working on for a while is the IgniteLansing event. IgniteLansing uses TechSmith's Camtasia to record our presentations and allow users to view what they may have missed via YouTube.

Our situation is very unique to most people's recording sessions - we have a string of presentations that we need to record, with about 30 second between. Luckily the Powerpoint tool makes it easy to record the sessions with minimal hassle.

Before you start your first session, it's best to setup the recording. Within PowerPoint, go to the Add-Ins tab and then click on the Snagit Preferences icon. Because we have to do quick turnarounds for our recording sessions, we make sure we turn off as much stuff as we can. We start the recording right away, don't record the mouse (they are PowerPoints), we don't want to edit the files in Camtasia when we are finished, and we want to stop the recording when we are done.

Finally, we go into the Advanced... settings for the Audio and Video setup to setup our microphone inputs. Run through the Audio Setup Wizard, and pay attention to what it is asking you to do (you shouldn't have to go into the Advanced Audio Settings). This is the MOST important portion of the exercise, and we need to do this right before we start recording our first presentation (however, we only have to do it once per event). If we get good audio, there is little to no work that has to be done after our recordings!

When we are ready to do our recordings, we launch the PowerPoint file, go to the Addins tab, and click on Record. When the presentation is finished, we are prompted to save the CAMREC file, and we can continue to the next presentation.
Now here is the time-saver. Because we already got good audio, and our screen was recorded in sync with it, when we are ready to do our editing, all we have to do is import the files into Camtasia Studio and clip the beginning and end of the document! We can usually do this editing in about 30 seconds before we have Camtasia encode and upload the presentation to YouTube.

Nick Kwiatkowski is a Telecom Engineer at Michigan State University. Additionally, he runs the Michigan Flex Users Group and helps run the Mid-Michigan ColdFusion Users Group, both located in Lansing, Michigan. On the side he also helps out with the IgniteLansing event that is based off the O'Reily Ignite series. You can read his blog at http://www.quetwo.com

You can see the Camtasia Studio recordings from IgniteLansing here on YouTube.

Big thanks to Nick for sharing his tip! Any volunteers for next week's Time Saver Tuesday?