Motivation: Check to see how versatile Camtasia Studio is
Features: Techsmith's Camtasia Studio 2.1 used to create Photo Slideshow

Techsmith's Camtasia Studio has a well deserved reputation for doing screen captures of running programs to video files - this is the logical extension of Techsmith's work in still image screen captures and video codecs. So the logical test of Camtasia is to give it another multimedia task, creating photo slideshows, and see how Camtasia fares in an adjacent domain.

The empty Camtasia workarea resembles that of many other multimedia tools. There is a Clip Bin to store image, video, and audio clips for quick and easy drag and drop use. The Preview Monitor on the right shows the status of the evolving presentation/video. There is a Timeline running along the bottom of the screen which can display multiple tracks as users develop their show. By clicking on the Show Storyboard button on the upper left of the Timeline the Timeline is instantly transformed into a Finally on the left there is a Task List which gives users a good guide as to how to develop their presentation. Follow in the order of the steps suggested by Camtasia and users will find their projects developing with minimum fuss. Speaking of which, all the commands in the tasklist are just that - one mouse click triggers the underlying command. Of course all of these Task List commands are contained in the complete set of command available in the menu.

To add the photos to your show, just click on the Show Storyboard button at the top left of the Timeline and then just drag and drop to the Storyboard. You can drag and drop to the Timeline as well - but the Storyboard view is bigger and easier to work with. In either view you can drag and drop the images to a new position in the Storyboard/Timeline or right click and choose Remove from Storyboard (or Timeline if you are using the Timeline view). To change the duration of a photo image right click and change its Duration from the popup menu . Or in the Timeline view (not Storyboard) click on the image or clips edge and just drag it out(lengthens the duration) or tuck it in/shorten the image/clip. Its that simple.

Adding transitions between the clips or slides is also very easy to do. So once you have the order of the slides set - adding transitions is the next task. You want to minimize the number of changes after you have set in the transitions because Camtasia (and all of the multimedia tools for that matter) drops/erases any transitions when you move or delete a clip/slide in the movie/presentation.

Camtasia has about 18 transitions to choose from, a workable list but not close to the dozens of choice available in say Ulead VideoStudio. Also, unlike other multimedia tools, Camtasia only allows five duration values - from 1 to 5 seconds.

But it is so simple to add a transition in Camtasia - just drag any transition between two clips on the Storyboard or Timeline and drop it. Bang you are done. It took at most 5 minutes to import the 12 photos in this this slideshow and add transitions including allowing time for reviewing 3-4 of the transitions.

To review a transition just highlight it and then play it in the Preview Monitor. One of the advantages of not having so many transitions in Camtasia is that the tendency to produce garish, jerky presentations with dozens of over-spectacular transitions is reduced. But designers should look to establish a theme transition (we used the pinwheel in our Toronto walls photo slideshow) and then add three or four alternate transitions, almost like harmonic notes in a chord. In short let the images determine the nature of the transitions - fades work well.

Audio and Production

In our last step, we shall add an audio track and then we are ready to produce our photo slideshow.

Adding audio is as simple as photos. Just click the Import audio command from the Tasklist (or CTRL+I for Import media). In the Open file dialog click on the audio clip(s) you want and it is brought into the Clip Bin. Now the audio clips will appear in the bin depending on how you have it sorted. Right-mouse click anywhere in the top of the Clip Bin and choose Sort by Type. This will collect all the audio clips together for easy use.

Again, inserting an audio clip is drag and drop easy. Make sure that Audio track 2 is visible in the Timeline (click on the Tracks pulldown and choose Audio Track 2 if it is not showing). The drag the audio clip you want and plop it where you want it. You cannot expand an audio clip unless you have previously shortened it. To do so is easy. Just grab onto the front of the audio clip you want o shorten and drag it to the right. Or grab the end with the mouse and drag left to shorten the audio clip from the back end. As you might guess the audio clip is trimmed in design but not fact. To clip audio and do other audio edits choose the Adjust Audio from the Edit portion of the Task List.

The screenshot above shows the editing options available for adjusting audio. Users can fade in, fade out, increase and decrease the volume of an audio clip. As well they can silence out (clear all sound for a portion of the audio clip or just delete a portion of the clip. be careful in the latter case because that can ruin all the synchronization between audio and video clip. Reduce to silence is often a better choice.

It is easy to highlight the ares of an audio clip where you want to apply the above edits. In the screenshot, the light blue highlighted area will be adjusted - all outside it will be untouched. To set up a selection/highlight area just drag the green selector cursor or bar at the top of the track over where you want to end the edits . Now here is the tricky part, then drag the first selector cursor over to the start of audio clip to be edited. As always the Edit | Undo command, also CTRL+Z, allows an edit to be reversed.

Now we are ready to produce the slideshow. We could add titles or Pan and Zoom effects to some of the clips (but that is all in comparison with dozens of tools clip filters/effects available with other tools). But for sake of brevity we shall click the Produce video as ... option from the Task List and the Production Wizard pops up. From the 5 choices we chose the Windows Media file format to test the compression versus quality trade-off that Camtasia advises in the production wizard. We were not disappointed.

The Windows Media File produced by Camtasia for 13 slides was done in 5 minutes on a Pentium III 800Mhz with 312MB of memory. And the size of the file was just less than 1.7MB. The quality of the presentation slipped notably in the transitions to what looked like 16bit colors but the slides themselves looked great. The audio was not affected by the transitions but was a bit tinny.

However, the strength of Camtasia Studio is its many production options and when we chose the recommended AVI output the production time nearly doubles to 9 minutes and the file size ballooned up to 12MB; but now the quality of both images including transitions) and audio was notably better - presentation caliber. So figure for 120 slides the production time will be in the hour and a half range and the file size about 160MB. But Techsmith can help in compressing those big files.

Bottom line - to my pleasant surprise I found that Camtasia Studio is more than equal to the task of creating great photo slideshows which certainly can help in delivering winning presentations. As we shall see, Camtasia Studio is industrial strength for creating video documentation - but it is very easy to use and adept at producing multimedia slideshows.