1. Start a project folder
  2. Prepare an outline of your audio
  3. Prepare whatever windows and graphics you need.
  4. Prepare a “Temp Pix” folder in that project folder
  5. Use Picasa to
    1. Round up all the pictures you are going to use,
    2. put them in an album, and
    3. export them to the “Temp Pix” folder.
  6. Now go through those pics with Microsoft Picture Manager and
    1. crop to a 4:3 (landscape) ratio. (click on filmstrip view — this allows you to quickly isolate the pics that need cropping)
    2. naming is also very quick in filmstrip view.
    3. Take note of what the smallest picture is and make a decision about frame size for your video. (in general, we want the version on our hard drive to be as large as possible. we can always reduce it from there.)
  7. Now go back to Picasa
    1. open that new folder in picasa and begin an export
    2. reduce everything to the size you decided on
    3. export everything to the project folder itself
  8. Open Camtasia Studio
  9. If you’re going to use screen capture…
    1. Choose “Record Video from Screen”
    2. Choose “Region of the Screen” (later I’ll need to specify a movable window, right?)
    3. Set a region of 320×240 pixels (may need to modify later)
    4. Check only “record audio”
    5. Recording source should be microphone. Do an auto-adjust if you haven’t already.
    6. Check to disable display acceleration (except with Sketchup or Google Earth) and then Finish the dialog box sequence.
    7. Click in the box that says “fixed region”. You will see a pop-down list.
    8. Click on “fixed region” even though it should already have a dot next to it.
    9. When the settings box comes up, uncheck the “fixed starting point” option. This will let you select a region just before capture begins.
    10. Click “Record”
    11. Wait. You’ll want to wait until you see the green flashing of the recorder box. Why rush? You can always trim off dead space at the beginning of the recording using Camtasia’s Editor.
    12. Make your recording.
    13. At the end, choose to save it as AVI. (this keeps us from getting locked into Camtasia.)
  10. If you’re going to create the video “slideshow style”
    1. Bring in all the pics/clips and order them
    2. Make the audio track
    3. Put in markers
    4. Adjust video to match markers
    5. Now clip out all the excess pauses
    6. Add in zooms, graphics, stamping, opener, closer,
  11. Now, “Produce Video As”
  12. Here’s how you would proceed if you wanted to try the “Recommended my Production Settings” track. Later we’ll look at the custom track.
  13. Choose “web”
  14. Choose “content types” that apply.
  15. choose quality levels for audio and video — 15 fps seems to be needed to avoid the blocks-o-color look.
  16. choose appearance of player.
  17. click finish and the files will be created and played for you in a web browser
  18. now you can approve of the production by clicking next
  19. click “production preset” and you’ll save all of these settings.
  20. okay, now we need to modify the yourfilename_config.xml — open it in notepad and find your file name (yourfilename.flv or yourfilename.swf) in the lower half of the document.
  21. Now, we need to change this name to an “absolute URL”, so first we have to figure out exactly where on the web we need for this folder to end up.
  22. Open your FTP client and go into your host filespace. I’m going to be storing my video folders along with all my other uploads in the appropriate year and date folders under wp-content/uploads/
  23. So, since my file is called test.swf, the “absolute URL” will be http://fineremodel.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/test/test.swf
  24. Don’t forget to include the name of the folder in which you’ll be uploading these 10 or so files (yes, I recommend you do it that way for the sake of orderliness)
  25. So make that change to config.xml if you haven’t yet.
  26. Now upload the entire folder to the space you chose at your web host.
  27. If you don’t have the Kimili plug-in for WP, get it and activate it now.
  28. Now create the page or post at WordPress in which you wish this video to reside.
  29. In the rich text editor, click on the little “f” icon.
  30. You need to modify that code to look like this: [kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.brooksandrus.com/blog_assets /screencasts/objectembed/320_controller.swf” width=”320″ height=”295″ fvars=”csConfigFile=http://www.brooksandrus.com/blog_assets /screencasts/objectembed/config.xml ; csColor=2E3233″ fversion=”8″ /]
  31. So now you should have the absolute references to your swf (or flv) file and your test_config.xml file in the code. Check that the quotes are real web-code quotes. You may want to include or disclude the www in the URL.
  32. Publish it.