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I’ve just finished my first tutorial video for one of my sites and I am rather pleased with the end result. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for some time, but never really figured out the best way to do it. I always felt that a tutorial video really needed a voice over, but I hate those ones that people have done, where lets be honest they don’t really have the voice for it. But just recently I’ve seen some great videos done with no voice over at all, so I wanted to try that way.

I tired a couple of screen capture tools for recording the video session but in the end the one I settled on was Camtasia Studio from Techsmith. For me it seemed to have the right blend of features versus price, and it also has a full feature 30 day free trial for you to really get to grips with the software.

The video is the first of a series I plan to make for my entertainment site and can be seen on the new virtual tour page, I created for the site. It took a few attempts at the recording stage to ensure that I had my screen set up ready to do all the video steps I need and to just get the feel for the general flow of it. I am sure having some kind of loose script of what you want to show beforehand will help.

Originally I planned to show lots of the sites features, including those for casual browsers as well as registered users. But as the recording time went up and up I soon realised this would be better broken into more manageable chunks and that way I can release the videos at an even schedule to the readers.

So initially I just settled on showing how the price comparison service works, by searching for a DVD, an electrical product and just giving a short overview of the shopping page. The final cut came to just over three minutes which I think is just about a reasonable viewing time. The original recording that I imported into Camtasia was around six minutes so even with my added titles you can see I cut the video quite heavily.

Editing in Camtasia is a breeze, I recorded the video at my full screen size 1680 x 1050 pixels and I set the output video to be 640 x 480. Inside the editing suite you can manually or automatically set it to zoom to the part of the screen that you want to focus on so that the 640 display is showing what the video needs to display. Personally I found the automatic mode to be zooming in and out too much, but it was very easy to set my own points.

The software makes it very easy to add title sections as well as various fade effects, and I knocked together a simple background image in photoshop to go with my titles. Finally just to round it off, with a quick search I found various royalty free music resources, that only required a simple credit to the author. So I downloaded some suitable music and added it into my video.

The whole process from starting recording to having a video ready on my website took no more than three to four hours and with practice I am sure it could be done in a lot less. I am very pleased with the end result and I’m sure I will be buying the software once my trial period is up.