Best practice guidance: library skills videos

To create a new Camtasia project using the Camtasia template:

• Open the 'Library Skills Branding Template' project in Camtasia.
• Go to the File menu and select Save As. Save your project somewhere sensible and give your project a new name.
• Delete all elements apart from:
  • One set of opening slide options from Tracks 2 and 3. There is a choice of one of 4 colours.. If you wish to insert a local library or NHS logo that has a white background to the image, you may want to select the white background slide.
  • If you wish to include text indicating the authorship, retain the text in track 4, which can be edited.
  • The black closer from Track 2.
  • If your video will have different titled sections, retain the simple rectangle of appropriate colour and accompanying text box from tracks 2 and 3. You can copy this to include it multiple times in your video.
• Start making your video in Track 1, replacing the 'all staff portico photo' which is in the template simply to represent content. 
• Edit the text on the title slide and section title slides as required.

Please note, the opener and closer have sliding transitions, which are indicated by turquoise rectangles. This means that the content of your video after the opener needs to overlap with the opener in track 2, at the point where the transition begins, and similarly it should overlap with the closer until the end of the transition.

Important!
When screen recording, be sure to keep the same aspect ratio as the template. The simplest way to do this is to record at full screen. You can select full screen from your web browser settings, if recording a web page. However, if you don't want to record full screen for any reason, you can select a custom recording area.

• When you hit record, a recording toolbar will display
• You can choose to select the area to record
• Hit the drop-down arrow next to custom
• Choose one of the top three options to keep the 16:9 ratio. Note that if you record at a resolution of below 1280 x 720, your recording will be smaller than the canvas size when you pull the recording onto the timeline in Camtasia. This is because the project settings for the template are at 1280 x 720.
• Press the padlock icon next to dimensions to lock the aspect ratio
• Now you can re-size the recording area as you wish 

Once you have put your recording on the timeline, drag the edges of the recording image on the canvas so that it covers the whole canvas area..Locking the aspect ratio means you be able to make your recording fit the canvas exactly.

All videos should have captions. When viewing a video made using Camtasia these will appear at the bottom of the screen when turned on.

Therefore, when you are making a video, avoid having any important content at the bottom of the screen, such as bullet points in PowerPoint, or activity taking place at the foot of the screen in a screencast, as this will be obscured by the captions.

Camtasia 9 is not backward compatible with Camtasia 8, so the project within the template files won't open in Camtasia 8. However, the media components can still be used. Simply import the image files contained in the template folder into the 'media bin' in your Camtasia project and follow the branding specifications.

Alternatively, create the project without opener or closer and send completed project to someone with Camtasia 9 to add the opener and closer.