We had a good FileMaker Pro User’s group meeting in Seattle this week with the topic centered around video training presented by Wendy King.

Here at Portage Bay we’ve produced a series of video ‘screencast’ training modules for E-Com, our special ed software written in FileMaker, so a lot of the information wasn’t new for me, but I really appreciated Wendy’s enthusiasm for the value of video based training. I came away with a greatly renewed interest in expanding our use of this technology along with three pages of notes on ideas I’d like to try.

At Portage Bay, we’ve done our videos using Camtasia Studio. While we generally prefer to use Mac applications, the Mac version of Camtasia is not as fully featured as the Windows version. In particular, I really like the way Camtasia Studio automatically focuses and zooms on the relevant parts of the screen while you’re capturing video. Its save a lot of time vs manually adding the zooms after capture. The other item we’ve found essential is an external microphone to get more professional sounding audio. We use an external USB microphone on a small desktop mic boom.

–John Newhoff