Students to Learn Video Editing Basics through Camtasia Presentation

Deciding on a lesson plan for the Teaching Multimedia course final project was simple.  Aside from equipment, what more does a broadcasting teacher who really doesn’t teach broadcasting need?  Lesson plans!  Lesson plans on the basics, to be exact, so, even though I would love to have worked with photography as my focus, I went with a lesson plan on teaching students how to edit video for a video story. 

The lesson planning portion went pretty quickly.  The biggest challenge was finding the best example video stories to show students.  After much searching of all the major newspapers’ YouTube channels, I settled on three examples that would show the range of what video stories could cover: a serious topic, a lighthearted topic, and a sports story. 

Editing Video to Tell a Story from Stephen Milligan on Vimeo.

During my search, I also came across a video story on multimedia producer Colin Mulvany’s Mastering Multimedia blog that was paired with a written narrative of his experience creating the video.  I also discovered his blog post “How best to approach a video story,” all of which I decided to incorporate into the lesson.

Next, I created the supporting documents (Video Comparison Chart, Video Story Brainstorming and Planning Form, 3-2-1 Form, and Video Story Scoring Guide) I would need to teach the lesson—a video story comparison chart, a video story brainstorming and planning form, a scoring guide, and a 3-2-1 form.

Now, on to the greatest task—the Camtasia presentation to accompany the lesson.  I downloaded the trial version of the program with no difficulty and viewed all of the recommended tutorials to familiarize myself with the process of creating the presentation.  After much procrastination, I sat down and made out a list of the major steps in the video editing process I wanted to cover: importing files, previewing clips, determining the set-in and set-out points, adding clips to the timeline, editing clips, adding transitions, adding lower thirds, adding B-roll, adding royalty-free music, and adding titles and credits.  I also made a couple of brief test runs with the program to make sure I was able to start and stop the recording and to be certain the microphone was working.

Then I plunged in.

I recorded one whole presentation straight through but wasn’t happy with it.  Then after many false starts, which quickly met with the delete key, I realized it might be best to just keep recording, even if it meant repeating a section, knowing I could edit it out later—ultimately accepting the fact that the presentation as a whole might not be perfect, but I liked the idea of maintaining a conversational tone instead of being too formal.

Editing the final recorded presentation was very similar to editing video using Adobe Premiere Elements 14, which we had learned previously in this course.  I inserted a title in front of the recorded portion of the presentation, selecting a theme from the preset themes available in Camtasia.  I also stuck with this theme when adding titles for each new topic introduced in the presentation.  I tried the pan and zoom function, but it didn’t seem to zoom in very closely, and when I realized the original recording was already at 86 percent, I opted to leave the entire presentation at full screen and highlight certain areas by making the rest of the screen blurred a bit, again using tools available in the program. 

I was disappointed to see that with the trial version, a watermark would be placed across the final presentation, and I almost fell off my chair when I saw the $299 purchase price for full access to the program to remove the watermark.  Alas, that’s not in the budget this year, so the version above is indeed watermarked.

I could see Camtasia being useful in the future, though, particularly when showing students layout and design concepts for the yearbook or how to use Photoshop or how to edit a podcast, so I’d better start saving or begging!