Motivation: Use Ulead VideoStudio 8 for video screenshows
Features: Test how well UV8 does in producing screen captures and shows

We have already seen that Ulead Video Studio 8 is fairly adept at producing large scale photo slide shows. Now it is worthwhile testing how well UV8 captures and produces screen videos of running desktop programs. This is the bread and butter application for Camtasia Studio; so it is a good test of multimedia versatility for UV8 as we have seen that Camtasia Studio acquits itself well in producing photo slideshows.

More and more screen captures are not just still images for page documentation; but video screen captures of desktop programs with all their GUI features - pop-up menus, pulldown selection, drag and drop operations, cursor changes hover over hotspots and links, scrolling windows, expanding and collapsing treeview or folded text are just a few of the rich client events that technical writers must document and marketers must promote to get their products greater sales.

Two approaches have been used recently - capturing screen events with Flash animations with products like TurboDemo, Macromedia RoboDemo (renamed Captivate), Instant-Demo and the use of video capture programs Camtasia Studio, Capture pro, Matchware ScreenCorder and others. There are four problems with screen capture programs. First, low frame rates for many Flash and animation captures means smaller files but also more herky-jerky motion on reproduction. Also both color and audio fidelity can suffer without adequate capture settings; but those settings can either tax the machine doing the capture operation or result in large-size final capture files. For CD/DVD and LAN use these large multimedia files are not as much of a problem as is the case with Web use where a typical screen show of five minutes may involve a 2-8MB download.

The other two problems with screen capture programs is that some GUI events including drag and drop operations or sound cues or popup or scrolling events can be completely missed depending on how sophisticated an analysis and parsing is done of the deluge that is Windows (or Mac or any) GUI event stream.This is important for programs that capture based on GUI event signals. Capture programs that record all events in a specific region can be a)bloated by non-event recording and b)deceived by events occurring outside the capture region. Finally, there can be a mismatch between the speed and capabilities of the capture program and the actual desktop events - just think of a rich 3D graphics program as an example.

UV8 Weak Capture, Strong Editing

In comparison to Camtasia Studio direct screen capture, UV8 can only record a screen by taking a video using an external digital video recorder pointed at the screen.The results we tried were a bit awkward to record but actually of fairly good quality. But bottom line, UV8 concedes capture advantage to direct screen recording tools like TurboDemo and Camtasia.

Other other hand, UV8 provides four different video editing modes. Now you might ask is having so many video editing modes important for modifying video screen captures ? You betcha!

The whole problem with video screen captures is that inevitably you have some dead spots or some small glitches that you want to edit out. Or there is a last minute feature that you have to add into the clip. Trust me - splicing and dicing is the name of the game in video screen captures. So the four methods provided by UV8 come in handy.

The first and obvious method is to use the Preview Monitor in clip mode. Just select the video clip you want to edit and slide the Mark in and Markout tabs over to trim the video clip. One can do the same thing in the Timeline view by grabbing the video clips start and end handles but the hand/eye co-ordination is a lot easier using the Preview Monitor. Use the Full Frame toggle button just to the right of the Markout tab to expand the preview monitor to full screen for even easier clip trimming.

To splice out a portion of a clip involves a two step operation using the Preview Monitor. Move the Jog bar slider over to the start of the portion of the clip you want to remove (Remember to click on clip editing mode). You can position the Jog bar slider precisely with the Next Frame and Previous Frame control (the 3rd and 4th buttons in the lineup of Preview Monitor control buttons at the bottom right of the screen shot). Once you have the splice point precisely positioned, click on the Split video button (scissors icon right next to bottom right of the preview Monitor. No it is simple to switch to the second clip and trim off the dead space in the video. And maybe insert a new clip at this point.

The final two methods for splitting/editing a video are the 2 automated clip modes shown on the left of the screenshot above. Split by Scene relies on Markers or Keyframes inserted by the video screen capture software plus Ulead's own transition recognition technology. Some people swear by this tool - this reviewer tends to swear at it.

However, the Multi- Trim Video editor is another thing. In the screenshot at the left the Multitrim editor is shown in action. Users select the mode of operation - Retain Selection means that all of the clip scene from the F3 Mark in/start to F4 Mark out will be kept in the clip. Any portion of the clip occurring before the Mark-in point is omitted unless its already part of a previously marked clip.

In the screenshot we have marked three sections of the clip shown in thin green to be retained. So when users click the OK button at the bottom, UV8 splices the clip into 3 or however many sub-clips have been marked and adjusts the main timeline accordingly. The advantage of the Multi-edit is that you can splice up a clip fairly quickly; the disadvantage is that its own preview monitor is pretty small and sometimes can present problems identifying precise transition points. Also you cannot add insert a replacement clip when using the Multi-edit dialog. But for fast splicing of clips with well defined transitions - Multi-edit is hard to beat.

Audio, VoiceOver, and Captioning

Once you have your video screenshow edited its time to add audio and voiceover. Its easier to add the voiceover first, then fill the gaps in the narration with music clips as desired. Also some producers like to stick with one audio track or loop and just lower the volume

In the screenshot above we have just added a voice over. Here is how. First click on the middle Tracks View in the Timeline. Then click on Audio in the TaskList buttons at the top left of the screen. In the Properties Pane the Audio settings should appear including the Record Voice option. But Record Voice may be grayed out. This occurs when the Timeline sector passes through a voiceover or audio track that already has an audio track. UV8 will not let you record over a voiceover nor audio track - hence another reason to add background audio after all voiceovers are done.

To add the voiceover, just line up the selector on the point in the Timeline where a voice over is required. Click Record Voice, adjust the microphone with the Windows controls before clicking the Start button in the voiceover dialog. Be sure to click the Stop Voice option in the Audio controls pane to stop the recording - otherwise UV8 will continue to record until the end of the project.

Editing the Voiceover clip is easy. Click on the Audio View button in the Timeline Pane. Then just drag and drop the voiceover to position it. Trim it by dragging the start or end handles appropriately. And increase the volume by dragging the midline volume level either up/increase or down/decrease. Editing voiceovers is as easy and identically the same as editing audio tracks.

Captioning, or titling as UV8 calls it, is a bit trickier because UV8 does not have any vector draw functions for lines, arrows, circles, or rectangles, etc. It is text only. So click the Track View in the Timeline and then Title in the TaskList buttons.

Double click on the screen and start typing your text/caption. You can adjust the Text's font, font size and color from the Titling settings that now appear in the Properties Pane. Users can add multiple titles on a frame as long as the Multiple titles option is selected. Users can also add animation effects to the tiles and change the line spacing using the settings controls.

Finally a title is just another clip - so it can be moved around in the titling track by dragging; or the Title clip can be lengthened or trimmed by dragging on its start or stop handle as appropriate. As noted the major problem with UV8 titling is that except for animation and coloring , there is no way to know for sure the difference between user added captions and the screen images own text. This problem particularly arises when documenting graphics and presentation programs.

Producing the Demo Video

Your audience will determine to a great extent how you want to produce your video. If they are on the Web that changes everything because the goal will be to compress and otherwise minimize the filesize without surrendering too much quality. Almost all the other options allow a user to err on the side of quality.

When users press the Share button from the UV8 TaskList, the options shown in the screenshot on the left appear in the Property Pane. Here is what each option allows:
Create Video File - create .avi, .rm, .wmv with many settings;
Create Disc - a wizards shepherds, CD, DVD, or SVCD prepping;
Project Playback - another wizard for TV or DV camera viewing;
Export - specialized output to different medium
Create Sound File - numerous options for saving sound tracks;
Share Video Online - Ulead's shortcuts for saving video

As can be seen, Ulead, like Camtasia Studio, offers a number of options for producing your videos. We tried two of the options here. The Share Video online Best Quality choice which which produce a .wmv Windows Media File at 640x480 and 30 frames per second. The file for our test clip of 30 second was only 820KB in size; but video quality of for the screen images was only fair to poor on transitions. So we switched to using the Create Video File option and used the Indeo compression filter at 30 frames per second, 720 x 480. The quality of the video was much better but the filesize had grown to over 5MBs for 30 seconds.

As in the case of Camtasia Studio, the number of output options for UV8 are large and we simply have not had the time to explore all the options. We tend to capture video screens at 1024 x 768 or 720 x 480. Now our next task will be to identify the optimal settings for those videos, possibly at a lower frame capture rate of 15 or 12 frames per second. As soon as we have some solid sets of results we shall report back.

In sum, UV8-Ulead VideoStudio acquits itself remarkably well in the Video Screen documentation arena. It falters on direct video screen capture; but certainly provides great video editing tools, a wealth of effects, and good voiceover and audio editing. The only other weak spot is the captioning and titling capabilities. Like Camtasia Studio and Premiere Elements, UV8's basic drag and drop operations make editing and creating great presentations remarkably straight forward. Obviously, the era of multimedia documentation is upon us.