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It's Tuesday so that means its time for some new Time Saver Tuesday tips! Up today we have a snippet from previous episode of The Forge. Today's tips are all about how to make your screencasts less awful!

I met Dan Nunez when he attended ScreencastCamp earlier this year. One of the sessions he led was called the '10 Commandments of Screencasting'. It was a big hit. Not only was it funny, but it was also informative. I promise, you will laugh and learn some useful tips! Plus, Dan rocks a really cool beard.

Here's a list of Dan's Commandments:

1. Hide the Goods
2. What to put behind you when using camera video
3. Choose the right desktop background
4. Honor your resolution
5. Don't stay thirsty my friends
6. Plainly state your intentions
7. Give your video an appropriate name
8. Shameless plug yourself
9. Get some rest

Do you have any Screencasting Commandments that you'd add to the list? Can you top Dan's beard?!?

Today's Time Saver Tuesday tip is to help you save time, deliver better narration and Picture-in-Picture video for your screencasts. Let's talk about Teleprompters!

Why use a teleprompter? They're useful for several reasons. They're great especially when you're recording Picture-in-Picture video. A teleprompter allows you to look into the camera lens so it doesn't look like you're reading your notes. I've seen a lot of screencasts and the host is looking down on the video, reading their script. It looks unnatural and I end up focusing on that and missing the message they're trying to deliver or teach.

With a teleprompter, you don't need to memorize your script. Who has time to do that anyway? I have other stuff to do.

In the past, buying or renting a teleprompter would set you back hundreds if not thousands of dollars. That was not an option for most of us. But now, there are lots of choices of teleprompter apps on Tablets. And, it makes sense to run a teleprompter off a tablet - free up your computer monitor and utilize your tablet when you're screencasting.

I've been using Teleprompt+ for iPad. I also like a free online teleprompter called, CuePrompter.

Don't have a tablet? You can use Microsoft PowerPoint as a teleprompter. Check out this article by Amit Agarwal at Digital Inspiration here.

Hopefully you've spent some valuable time working on a script or points you want to hit in your screencast. Deliver the best narration and audio you can. A teleprompter can help with that.

Which teleprompters have you tried? Do you have a Time Saver Tip? Email me and I'll include it in a future blog post!

It's Tuesday so it must be time for another time saving tip!

This week's tip is for Camtasia for Mac. I've been on a hotkey kick lately and this week is no different.

In Camtasia for Mac, you can access keyboard shortcuts in the product by selecting Help>Keyboard shortcuts.

Also, you can download a PDF for Camtasia for Mac 1.1 with all the keyboard shortcuts here.

What are some of your time saving tips? Next Tuesday will be here before I know it and I need your help with some new tips!

After Tuesday's blog post, I've heard a few requests for a PDF of the list of Camtasia Studio's hotkeys.

You can download your own copy of all the hotkeys here. Enjoy!

Any other requests for printouts?

And, a special thanks to Fred Grover and Donald Smith for making PDFs as well. I appreciate it!

"If I save time, when do I get it back?" Too bad it doesn't work that way in life! :-)

It's time for another Time Saver Tuesday! We had a request during our recent Camtasia 24 Screencasts in 24 Hours about publishing all the hotkeys in one place (they're listed in a various sections of our Online Documentation here). I thought this was a great idea! I'll start with Camtasia Studio's shortcut keys this week. I love to save a few keystrokes on repetitive or common operations that I need to perform by using hotkey shortcuts.

Here are all the places you can find and customize hotkeys in Camtasia Studio. I hope they help you save time when creating your screencasts!

Camtasia Recorder

Navigate to: Camtasia Recorder > Tools > Options > Hotkeys tab

To assign keyboard hotkeys:

1. Select a recording function.
2. Choose the shortcut keystrokes.
3. Click OK.

What is ScreenDraw? ScreenDraw allows you to add drawing effects like arrows, circles, highlights, pen and more over the screen while you are recording.

Note: When you use ScreenDraw while recording your screencast, the drawing is permanently burned into the recording and cannot be changed or removed. OR after recording, you can add arrows or callouts in Camtasia Studio and it creates a similar effect. However, arrows and callouts in Camtasia Studio can be edited.

Use these hotkeys to add effects at the position of the playhead on the timeline.

Navigate to: Camtasia Studio > Tools > Options > Hotkeys tab

The effects hotkeys allow you to add elements or effects (callouts, zoom keyframes, etc.) to the timeline with a keyboard shortcut. To edit the element or effect once it is on the timeline, double-click it. The appropriate tab opens.

Now it's your turn! Please share! What are some of your time saving tips?

Anyone can make a screencast, right? I mean, you just hit the big red button and start recording.

But, what sets apart an average screencast from a masterpiece? With a little planning, you can take your screencast to the next level. There a few small things you can do before you hit the record button to get a higher quality screecast.

I asked around the office today for tips about what to do before you record a screencast. Since I like Top 10 lists, here is list of the "Top 10 tips to do before you hit the record button!"

1. Put a sign on the door to keep unwanted visitors out, mute phones, disable all other possible sources of noise - Dave McCollom, Education Evangelist
2. Clean up your desktop! This will keep your viewers attention and they won't be distracted by your icons. I like to use something like Fences from Stardock on the PC or Ryan Eash, an Instructional Designer from TechSmith's Training Department, has two monitors. So, he drags any icons/files/etc that he doesn't want to show to the monitor he's not recording.
3. Clean your Apps and Browser - Don't want people seeing your browser history? Have sensitive documents, account information or past projects you don't want your viewers to see? Make sure you clean up your history, past projects or Camtasia Library so it doesn't show information you want to keep private. If you forget something and it ends up in your recording, well, that's where the blur callout in Camtasia Studio comes in handy. :-)
4. Set the stage - After you've cleaned up your desktop, set your desktop color. For our Camtasia Studio screencasts we set the desktop color for our videos to RGB of 51, 51, 51. Pick something that is not too distracting...if the desktop is being shown - Ryan Eash
5. Script it out - Ryan Eash shared an example of one of the scripts they used in a recent project. Follow along the final screencast here with the script here. It will show you how the screencast was put togehter. The script shows the narration on the right and either some screenshots or text on the left that illustrates what's going to be shown on the screen at that time.
6. Get Feedback - Run your script or storyboards by others before you record. Get feedback on your language and the clarity of what you're showing - Conan Heiselt, Instructional Designer
7. Check 1, 2, 3 - Do a quick sound check - record a few minutes of audio and test for quality - Walter Pelowski, Customer Solutions Engineer
8. Dress rehearsal - Do a quick Jing screencast to make a prototype of your screencast. You can see what worked well or needs to be changed before you record your screencast - Conan Heiselt
9. Record and edit your audio - It's easier to record your screencast if you don't have to worry about recording the audio at the same time. You can play your audio while you record the screen. That way you have your timing down and it is easy to sync the audio and video together. - Conan Heiselt
10. Set your recording area - Set your recording area (either full screen resolution, or custom region) to an aspect ratio of what you plan to edit and produce to. For the Camtasia Studio 7 Learning Center videos, the final video dimensions were 800×450 (16:9), so Ryan Eash made his custom region for recording set to 1376×774 (16:9) and it resized nicely into the 800×450 dimensions for editing and production.

This is where I need your help! I need your tips! What do you do before you record your screencast?

We'll compile all the tips into an ebook and share them with you.

Prefer to post your tip on Twitter? Please use the hashtag of #screencasttip so I can find your tip.

Have you ever created the perfect screencapture with Snagit - maybe you added text or other objects to your capture and then you saved it. And, if you're like me, then you decided to change something - maybe resize the text or remove an arrow. Well, no need to recreate that capture from scratch after you learn this Time Saver Tuesday trick! You'll be able to save time and create a file you can modify any time.

Meet the .SNAG file format. Save your screencapture as a .SNAG file and you can open it later to modify or edit the vector objects (Lines, Arrows, Shape, Highlight, Paintbrush, Stamp, Callouts and Text tools) any time.

The .SNAG file format is a Snagit Editor-only file. If you need to use your image outside of Snagit environment, like Microsoft Word or PowerPoint for example, you just save the final .snag file as the image format of your choice (like a .png or .jpg). When saving in these other file formats, the vector objects will be flattened and made a permanent part of the image.

To save your image as a Snagit Capture File:

1. Click the Application button.
2. Hover over Save As to expose the menu.
3. Click Snagit Capture File.

What is your Time Saver Tip? Email me if you'd like to be a guest blogger and share your tips and tricks!

Throughout the day I'm working in a variety of programs. I'm guessing you do the same. And, I'm often adding screenshots all over - I'm using them in my email, on Twitter, in a project plan in OneNote, as a title screen in a Camtasia Studio screencast and more...

You can save yourself some time and a few steps by using Snagit 'outputs'. With Snagit outputs, you send your captures directly from Snagit's Preview Window directly to the program or website of your choice with a single click. No need to save the capture and then find the saved image and import or paste into another program (that's way too many extra steps!).

You can download the Snagit outputs here. We have a Snagit output for: Screencast.com, Camtasia Studio, MindManager, Fog Creek FogBugz, Visual Studio Team System, Blogs (Movable Type, TypePad, WordPress.com and LiveJournal), Snagit Notes, Instant Messenger (Skype and AOL Instant Messenger), Flickr, and Microsoft Office (Word, OneNote, Excel and PowerPoint).

What other programs would you like to send your Snagit screen captures directly to? What would save you time?

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?

Say you were working on a series of Camtasia Studio screencasts for a big project at work. And, you create 20 videos. Your project manager requested the videos be in the SWF format to put on the intranet.

But, then the Sales team just all got iPods for training purposes. And, now your project manager wants all of your screencasts in a different file format and scaled down in size to play on the iPod... oh and they want to distribute the files at the next sales meeting in less than 24 hours! Ah, changing specs and short deadlines.

No need to worry or pull an all nighter to re-produce all 20 screencasts one by one. Camtasia Studio has a batch processing option that saves you time by allowing you easily produce multiple Camtasia Studio projects at the same time using production presets. Set your preferences, start the 20 files batch processing, walk out the door and let Camtasia Studio do all the work.

See these instructions here about how to set up the Batch Processing options in Camtasia Studio.

What tips do you have for Time Saver Tuesday? A limited edition Snagit sweatshirt could be yours if you share your tips!

This week's Time Saver Tuesday tip comes from a comment by by Nina Volstad left on a blog post I did last year about using card stock for your scripts (eliminates shuffling noise which could be picked up by your microphone!).

For the great audio and less editing, it's best to do a little planning and prep before hitting record. Nina had a great tip about working with scripts. She uses two different hightlight-markers to mark the two different "actions" she has in her script. That way she can easily keep everything making it easier to record audio and video at the same time. The

Nina highlight the points in her manuscript where she needs to click, point or enter text in the screen that she's recording in one color. And, then highlights in a second color any points in the manuscript where she plans to add a callout in post production.

Using this system cuts down on accidents - you don't start pointing at something you would have marked with a callout. Plus there are no delayed clicks while you figure out what to do next.

Recording goes smoother and you end up with a more polished video with less editing time. A little prep can go a long way. And, I find the less I have to think about at record time, the better.

Now, I know many of you must have a great tip for a Time Saver Tuesday blog post! Please email it to me. I'd love to show off your tip and share your story!

And, to sweeten the deal, if I pick your Timer Saver tip, I'll send you one of these Snagit 9 hoodies. Very few people outside of TechSmith have one of these sweatshirts. You'd be a part of the inner circle. :-) I only have a few left, so first come, first serve.

And, by the way, modeling the sweatshirt is TechSmith's videographer, Kelly Rush! You've heard me talk about him a lot. Hopefully we can get him on the other side of the camera to share some of his time saving tips. :-)

Surfing Twitter today, reminded me of a little known feature in Snagit that can save you lots of time...

Snagit has a 'printer' capture option. Snagit shows up as a 'printer' that you can choose when you go to print an image or document. This is useful for several reasons - you can use Snagit as a virtual printer. You don't need to print out your critical documents that you need to archive because the Printer Capture will capture and save your output as a graphical file. It saves it exactly as it would print so you now have an electronic version of your document - no need to print and file your document.

OK, how many of you have ever been sent a PDF that you're expected to print, fill out by hand and fax back? I often travel so I don't always have access to a printer or a fax machine. And, I'll be honest, I'm lazy - that's far too many steps. I use Snagit's Printer Capture to virtually print the document and use Snagit's text options to fill out the needed fields. I can even add a watermark to the doc if needed. Then, I can save the document as a PDF and just email and share the document with anyone.

Check out the tutorial and more reasons to use Snagit's Printer Capture option here.

And, as Hal Rottenberg notes on Twitter, '"@TechSmith":http://twitter.com/techsmith I hate hand-writing forms. I have bad handwriting, that may have something to do with it. :)'. I have the same issue - if I fill out the form by hand, people might have a hard time reading it. It's far easier and faster for me to type out the fields.

Any tips you have to share for next week's 'Time Saver Tuesday'? Email me or post them in the comments!