Creating and editing videos

[GeorgeBell]

My apologies if this is the wrong forum to ask on - I'll be happily re-directed if so.

I'd like to begin including videos with audio in my Flare V10 Project. Essentially this will be simply recordings of the application on screen with voice overlay.

What software do others use which would allow me to do this, and edit sound and video to remove or add bits as I go?

[kwag_myers]

I've had success with MadCap Mimic, although I've yet to included audio in a project. You can look over the online Help here to see if it meets your needs, or download a free trial version from the home page (which appears to be offline at the moment).

[sarrants]

We use Camtasia Studio (TechSmith) to record and produce the video. We also use Audacity for the audio and use that audio in the Camtasia Studio project.

[NorthEast]

I guess it depends what you want to do in your videos, e.g. are you just recording live video, do you want to produce software recording/simulations, or interactive tutorials?

I've used Camtasia, Captivate (Adobe), and have also tried Mimic; I tend to use Captivate most often.

Camtasia is designed for recording live video, and has good post-production features - it's a bit like a video editing suite.

Captivate is designed more for recording software simulations, or producing tutorials. It is different to Camtasia because it works by taking a series of individual screenshots and records mouse and keyboard movements, and uses these to create an 'animation'. I found the big advantage of this is that it's possible to easily manipulate the video after recording, e.g. insert/replace/delete sections, edit mouse movements, change timings, or include 'fake' content. Captivate has a mode to record live video too, like Camtasia, but it's post-production isn't nearly as advanced as Camtasia.

I think Mimic is more similar to Captivate in how it works. I've tried using it a few times, but gave up because it didn't work very well; it couldn't adequately record actions in the applications that I tested it with.

Anyway, all of these have free trials.

[SteveS]

We used to use (in another workplace) Jing to capture screen video. It was handy in a support role, if we had a "how do I?" trending we could capture how to do it and release on our users forum.

I didn't try embedding in Flare at the time so I can't say how well that would work.

Oh, and Jing is free. Its made by Techsmith, the same people who gave us snagit