10 Tips for Creating PowerPoint Lecture Videos Using Camtasia

Break apart long presentations into a series of shorter ones to focus on one topic per short video. Take the time to plan out how you want your video series to flow.

A two-minute commercial uses storytelling to provide a tiny bit of context to make the most mundane product memorable. How can you introduce your subject, build suspense, or curiosity? What the “moral” of your story, why should students care? What kind of image or approach would help to illustrate this?

Your viewer can either listen to you OR read text on-screen, but they can’t do both! Remove as many words as possible, and use more images and diagrams to convey meaning. Keep the time on each slide brief, perhaps just a few minutes. Using transitions and animations in your PowerPoint means less work creating those in Camtasia!

Conduct a sound and camera check to make sure it’s good. Buy or borrow an external mic to significantly improve audio quality. (Use a headset to hear how bad that built in mic on your laptop really is.)

You can record just your voice or you can also capture a video of yourself in the corner of your presentation if you have your webcam enabled. (You can move or even delete that video of yourself later if you change your mind.)

It’s easy to incorporate additional content, (audio, video, more images etc.), after you’ve make your video recording. (As mentioned earlier, however, if you plan ahead and add transitions and animations into the PowerPoint itself, your video will look really nice with no extra editing work!)

You can remove extended pauses or unwanted noises, or add a little stock introduction with music at the beginning of each lecture. But a good rule of thumb is to keep it simple. If you followed a well-written script you shouldn’t have to edit out long pauses or meandering off topic.

Judicious use of these are great for focusing audience attention, but they should not be too distracting. Stick to a consistent theme throughout each video. And remember, if you add transitions with a single-click in your PowerPoints, you won’t need to add these in Camtasia after the fact.

Apply Speech-to-Text to caption your video (Windows version only) then edit for accuracy. When you upload your video, make sure to check the box to include your captions. If you want YouTube to add captions for you, you MUST specify the language.

The produced size should always be the same as recording size. Upload to YouTube and edit settings to make your video unlisted NOT private. Copy the YouTube link, and paste it on a page in Canvas!