A Step By Step Guide To Making Movies with Camtasia That Anyone
Can Do Using PowerPoint For Movies With Text
Slide 2
Start with a blank PowerPoint slide using your favorite
template. It will look something like this. Then by dragging the
respective boxes flip flop the Title and Add Text boxes.
Slide 3
The result should look something like this. Then change the
font size in the Title Box to 24 point. You might have to
experiment. The goal is to accommodate 3 lines of text.
Slide 4
Now make several copies of your newly created slide. (Right
click in the slide pane and choose duplicate slide. That will serve
as a template for you.
Slide 5
The effect is to make the text at the bottom like subtitles or
captions. The movie itself will shrink. If displayed in a blog it
will be 400 x 300, so need large text to keep it readable.
Slide 6
The upper pain is regular PowerPoint and with that you can do
what PowerPoint does. In this case there is a simple animation of a
well known math result. (x + y) 2 =(x + y) =x 2 +2xy + y 2
Slide 7
For an image simply paste it into the upper box. It should size
well so it fits nicely. Technically this is quite easy with the
real work finding the appropriate images.
Slide 8
PowerPoint likes to resize the text in the caption when there
are about to be three lines of text. Resize it back to 24 point,
but dont have more than three lines afterwards.
Slide 9
Camtasia has a plugin for recording PowerPoint in Slideshow
Mode. It is very nice but it doesnt show the timings, so rehearse
the timings in PowerPoint itself.
Slide 10
If you are going to do this to background music, it is probably
easiest to have a uniform time per slide. For this much text, 10
seconds is ample and easy to measure.
Slide 11
When you are finished recording and adding your sound track,
you are ready for production. There is a preset for Blog that is
easy to use and makes the right size.
Slide 12
Conceivably you could actually write this way, which might make
sense if you feel your writing is a bit lyrical. In this particular
case, since it is a demo, the image box was deleted and then the
box with the captioning was expanded to take up the full screen. So
technique-wise it is pretty easy to do. Do note that unless the
actual PowerPoint file is included (as a link, for example) the
text in the video wont be searchable because during the capture it
gets converted to an image. Also let your viewers know they can
pause the video if the screen transition happens faster than theyd
like.
Slide 13
Lets close with a caution about Copyright. This particular
image was found at The Huffington Post. Do they have a right to use
it? Do you? Dats all folks.