Tag: camtasia
PowerPoint Camtasias
I can't believe I haven't given away this procedure on the blog before. I think I've mentioned it in passing once or twice via comments, and explained it in the private Product University membership last month, but I'm sick of repeating myself, so...
Here is the formula to turn an audio product into a video product. It requires Camtasia ($299 with 30 day free trial) and Microsoft PowerPoint (OpenOffice is free, or you can get the downloadable home edition of Office 2007 for only $80 on Amazon).
Let's pretend you have an audio product that's 27 minutes long.
1. Open up a blank PowerPoint and start playing the audio in your MP3 player. (The default black and white theme will work fine for this.)
2. Fast forward to 1:00 (one minute) in the audio and start listening. Type in the main point of 1:00 to 1:59 as the headline of the slide, and type three quick bullet points of 1 to 6 words each. (Pretend you're back in school and taking quick notes).
3. When the audio passes 2:00, skip to slide 2 by hitting ctrl+enter. Type in your headline and three bullet points for 2:00 to 2:59 in this.
4. Repeat for the duration of the audio. The beauty of this is if you need to stop at say, 15 minutes, you can come back and you'll know exactly where you left off. By the end of this, your 27 minute audio now has 27 slides.
5. Insert a slide in front of all the other slides in the PowerPoint. Change its layout to title slide, and type in the name of the product and the author.
6. (Optional) Edit the master slide and insert your URL at the footer, that way your URL appears on all slides.
7. Select all slides. In PowerPoint 2003, go to Slide Show... Slide Transition. In PowerPoint 2007, there should be an Animation tab. UNCHECK the "advance slide on mouse click" box, and click the "automatically after" box, then type in 01:00 for one minute.
8. Resize your screen to 640x480 resolution, fire up Camtasia Recorder and set it to capture WITHOUT sound, full screen, at 1 frame per second.
9. Start the slide show and hit record (once you get good at this you can actually do it in one click with the "Add-Ins" menu but let's not get ahead of ourselves). Leave the computer, because if you click around on other windows, even if you have multiple monitors, it will mess up the slide show. Don't take too long of a walk because you'll want to be there to hit Stop as soon as the slide show goes black.
10. Stop the slide show, save the camrec, open up Camtasia Studio to edit your recording and import both the camrec video and the MP3 audio. Add a 2nd audio track and drag the MP3 in as the audio.
Congratulations, you've just turned your 27 minute audio into a 27 minute video, and it only took you 27 minutes to listen to the audio and about 2 minutes to get it into Camtasia Studio.
Now export it to an SWF 1 frame per second video if you want to show it on the web. If you want a downloadable version, I prefer to export to WMV. Camtasia 5 has a checkbox that will also export into an iPod version. Cool beans!
Guess what, you can also export the PowerPoint slides into PDFs as well. You've just given yourself an excuse to charge $10 or $20 more for your product.
Don't even have an audio product? Read your book aloud, word for word. Record it into Camtasia and export just the audio (I don't even bother with programs like Audacity).
This is how I make audio products. I'll record text word for word into audio, then PowerPoint it to make it a video.
Most of the time I'll do it backwards, and write PowerPoints where 1 slide = 1 page, then record the PowerPoint with Camtasia running, capturing audio as I read each page aloud, and change the slide when I turn the page.
Then export the PowerPoints into PDF, camrecs into WMV, MP3 and iPod... $17 e-book becomes a $47 video product.
For the products Jason and I are creating for the Daily Seminar, most of the time we don't even bother with the text... who has time to write when you are recording a 20 to 60 minute seminar every day? Just record Camtasia PowerPoints and export video plus audio plus slides. If people really want text, we'll transcribe them, but those costs really add up.
What are your thoughts? Do you use something similar to my PowerPoint Camtasia method? Do you have an even BETTER system than me? Please tell me to know, I'm dying to hear about it!
Daily Video Challenge
I added a small daily task to my schedule, starting yesterday, that I CHALLENGE you to try:
Record One Video Every Day
This is going to be a daily video diary for your business. (I recommend a Camtasia video, not a webcam video... but in some niches, Camtasia doesn't apply very well.)
Here are the rules:
Rule 1: I don't want you to show it to anyone other than yourself, just stick it in a folder somewhere. You can turn this into a paid product, or show it to ONE business associate but do not just give it to the general public for free.
Rule 2: I don't care what it's about as long as it relates to your business. Yesterday I spent 18 minutes explaining why February 2008 was my best month, passing up June 2007, and what things I did different than last year. You can record for 5 minutes or 30 minutes, but it has to be in one take.
Rule 3: If you end up showing it to someone else, it has to be a paid product. Membership video, DVD, one time product, whatever... just DON'T give it away as a blog post.
I was just thinking last night that recording videos is something I can't do consistently. I can write consistently because I have lots of practice, especially from posting in this blog. But videos... out of the 20+ infoproducts I have out there, 14 are video-based. Videos are my weakest skill at the moment.
Do you remember my three tips to fast infoproduct creation? Let's see how they stack up against the daily video challenge...
- It doesn't have to look good, just be good. That's the whole idea here. You spend 5 minutes creating the sloppiest video ever, because the video DOESN'T have to be that great and no one is going to see it.
- Get excited about your topic. You're choosing what to talk about so why not? I think that if you make enough videos on enough subjects, you will find something to talk about that you are excited about.
- Practice. You're recording a video EVERY DAY. This technique is practice... by definition. You'll establish good habits for yourself and in no time, videos will be a cinch for you to make.
Can you get to recording your video already? If you're worried about taking time out of your day, limit yourself to five minutes.
The video you record might end up being your next product.
The video could just be you going over your to-do list for the day... describing what you did and didn't accomplish. Maybe you'll watch it again 6 months from now and notice how your business has changed over time.
You might record yourself putting a product of yours to use... now you have an excellent how-to video to bundle with your product. You've just cut down on customer support requests.
Heck, I plan on doing a couple videos of nothing but me working on my project. What a great way to keep yourself on task!
If you know the cameras are rolling, do you think you'll get distracted and check e-mails, instant messages, and forums? Or do you think you'll actually focus on one single thing till it's done?
I thought so.
Please, leave a comment here and let me know if you accept this challenge. If you want to give me a little hint about what your first 5 minute video will be about... go for it... but you don't have to.
If you read through this whole post and DIDN'T comment, that tells me you're chickening out.
You're not a quitter... are you?
Remove Chipmunks from Camtasia Videos
Eugene Humbert, cool guy that he is, sent me an e-mail the other day letting me know that my Camtasia videos were producing weird "chipmunk" sounds.
This only happens with recent (version 9) versions of the Adobe Flash player. There's an easy solution:
Download the Camtasia Audio Bug Fix.
(The zip file is located at the bottom of that page.)
TechSmith solved this in Camtasia 5.02.... but I still use Camtasia 4 because I want my videos to look the same. By the way, this is ADOBE's fault and not Camtasia's.
The cool thing about this tool is, you can drag a whole FOLDER containing your SWF files, and the tool will find the SWF files even if they are buried deep inside other folders.
Last night, I de-chipmunked 14 video products. It didn't take that long at all because I used the above method.If you want the technical explanation of why this had to be done, Flash 9 can't properly play MP3 in SWF files that is encoded at a non-standard bitrate (it only understands bitrates that are a multiple of 11.025 Hz). The audio fixer quickly re-encodes the MP3 audio stream in your Flash file.
Why was all this extra work for me a good thing? It enabled me to finish adding affiliate programs to ALL my infoproducts.
All my products now have the affiliate subdomain trick built-in, as well as solo ads, an affiliate page for quick copy and pasting, and a call-to-action in the final chapter explaining to readers how to join the affiliate program for the product.
Heck, I've even JV Plus enabled all those products on this blog.
Before I encountered this chipmunk emergency, I was lazily working away, putting up maybe 3 or 4 affiliate pages per day. That was a task that I told myself I'd finish FIRST before anything else. So, I had to hurry up and finish all the solo ads before I could begin de-chipmunking.
I whipped out Microsoft Excel, copy and pasted all the product links on this blog's sidebar, then made a column for each thing I had to do for the site (write the solo ad, link to the affiliate page, setup an upsell, write the call-to-action, update the PDF file, de-chipmunk) and I just plowed through it. Because I had to.
So, don't forget to de-chipmunk your Camtasia videos if you haven't already.
