Tutorial Creation Setup

[brandondrury]

Hello,

I'm new to this video business, but I'm very very experienced in audio land. (I make my living as an audio engineer.)

I'm looking to create audio mixing tutorials. I like the idea of using Camtasia or equivalent to capture the video on screen, but it appears that Camtasia will not work with ASIO audio drivers. So that rules out me using my high end recording setup....which basically can't happen while I'm teaching mixing tactics. So Camtasia is out.

I also like the idea of breaking up the on screen video and switching to a camera on me so that I can talk.

While I realize that I could do this separately with a standard video camera at a later time, I like the idea of conducting the entire tutorial live. I just want to sit down for an hour and hammer it out. My dream setup would have a simple A/B switch that allows me to select either a video signal from my recording computer or video signal from my little camera to be fed into some software on my video recording computer.

I'll also be running audio out of my recording computer to a mixer which I'll blend my voiceover and run that into my video recording computer simultaneously.

So, I have a few questions.

1)Does this seem like a reasonable way of creating my on-the-fly tutorials?
2)Can you make any recommendations as far as the “A/B switch”, the type of video card I'd need to the right signal out of my recording computer, the type of “capture card” I'd need for my video computer, and the type of camera I'd need for my talking?

I'm not looking to make stellar looking videos. Obviously, I don't want them to be horrible, but I'm teaching and therefore aesthetics don't have to be top notch. These will end up on DVD and MAYBE on the web a bit.

While I'm willing to pay the price to meet my goals, I'd rather not have to give up other goals to meet this one.

Brandon

[Photo-John]

I don't have any help to offer you. But I wanted to chime in because I'm interested in the same thing. I don't have any special audio needs, though. I just need a good video screen capture application - preferably a free one

[brandondrury]

I had good luck with several free screen capture programs (although they would never work for sound). Do a search for "GPL screen capture". "GPL" stands for open source. There are quite a few options out there.

Good luck!

Brandon

[Skyman]

actually there is a better way.
I am assuming you are using pro tools or something similar...
anyway you should be able to set up a camera to record you from an angle you like as well as using camtasia et al for the screen capture. You could connect up your own audio gear to the video camera or even better record it as you would normally and import that into your editing suit. Most decent video editing applications can handle multi camera shoots very easily. I use adobe premier pro so I am most familiar with their method of doing it, but it is fairly similar with avid and final cut pro. Basically what you do is create two video sequences, one for your source clips and one for your multicamera edit. lay all your video clips into the timeline for your source clips and mark their synch point (the clips can be any length) and line up their synch points - this is where a clapper board or some such comes in handy as it is a visual and auditory que for the synch point, but you can use whatever your want as the synch point as long as you can determine closely enough that the different video sources match up. If your audio isn't already synched to one of your video tracks, then you would also do the same to the audio track and import it from whatever format you have it in (premier pro will handle almost all professional audio formats) and set its synch point. You then line up all the synch points in the timeline.

next you open up the other sequence and drag the first sequence to the timeline (called nesting sequences) you then target this track and choose clip multi camera enable. Then turn on the multi camera view in the window menu. You can now play the video and see the synched clips displaying in real time in small windows as well as a larger window showing the mutli camera preview. To swap between your different sources you just click on the small windows for the clip that you want and the sequence is automatically cut with that selection. after you have finished making your cuts you can add transitions as you would normally, although with good editing this shouldn't be needed.

It would probably help a lot to have a solid script to go with your demonstration, and you may find it necessary to cut your multi cam clip to remove any mistakes or unwanted parts before you start jumping from one camera source to another.