Client How-To Videos: Camtasia V7 Production and Rendering

We recently purchased some Camtasia licenses for our company to create videos of various user related tasks such as adding multiple mailboxes into Outlook 2010, connecting and using the Remote Web Workplace, RDP via TS Gateway, and others.

The use of Camtasia to create videos specific to each of our clients has had an amazing impact on them. So far, every single time we have created a new video to answer a specific question, or provided an overall guide for everyone in the client’s office, we received a 110% positive feedback.

Camtasia and creating these user oriented How-To videos has become a Killer App in our ability to build a business relationship with our clients.

After capturing the relevant video of the task, we edit the clips in Camtasia studio adding the relevant callouts.

This is the title of a video we just finished producing for a client that signed up for the OWN Hosted Exchange services we provide:

Using Camtasia Studio, we can zoom in on certain events that are taking place on the desktop we have recorded to help provide focus for the viewer:

Note that the callout provides feedback to the viewer and helps them to know what bits of information are needed for each of the fields. Of course, in the video those bits get filled out right before their eyes!

Once we have created the video that we are going to send to our client and upload to the Companyweb SharePoint site, we need to render that video.

In the Task Manager, this is what the rendering does to the Core 2 Extreme QX9650 series system with Windows 7 Enterprise x64 in Processes:

This is what the Performance tab looks like:

Once the rendering starts, Camtasia is quite capable of pushing this system to its limits. So, any Core i5 or Core i7 based system should be able to do a good job of rendering the project video quite efficiently.

Camtasia does look to take advantage of all 4 cores on this system, so having a quad core system will improve rendering times over a dual core system.

We have a pair of Intel X25-M series SSDs in RAID 0 for this system too. So, in effect the drive subsystem should not be a bottleneck in any way for the rendering process.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer