Tech Challenged Rears It's Ugly Head - Part III (and final)

It is done, well, not really, but I have fifteen little Camtasia projects that just have to be published.  They all include a bit of audio and video  It is far from perfect, but I learned A LOT this weekend!  I'll summarize for you here:

1.  It is possible for someone who really had no idea any of this existed to do it.

2.  Pay attention when you are recording your audio. If you mess up or stumble, don't worry about it. Just stop, take a breath and start over.  But, leave enough room so that it is easy to edit.  Editing out little fumbles is very time consuming, challenging and extremely frustrating.  This dawned on me at about project ten.  I am not a rocket scientist . . .

3.  When you video, give yourself some time on the video before you start.  Again, it gives some room for editing.  Another lesson I learned after the video was done.  Somethings I'll just have to live with!  For some reason, if I tried to delete the first few seconds of a video I lost the picture.  Needless to say, a black screen with audio was not the look I was going for.

4.  After all my soapboxing about PowerPoint, I didn't follow my own advice in a couple of the projects.  Upon review, there is one that could really benefit from some more work . . .

5.  That being said, you may have to take it easy on yourself and remember that the learning is in the journey, not necessarily the final project.  Here's what I mean.  I've got a couple of places in my project that I wish I could make better.  But, no matter how hard I try, I just can't quite get it.  So, I thought about my audience (the folks that will actually use the program, not the grade for this class) and wondered how much they will focus on the couple of baubles in my recording.  Fact is, they won't so I'm going to leave them.

I'm pretty sure some of this would have been easier with fancier tools, but I accomplished this all with free programs and an old computer with Vista as the operating system, which sometimes makes things funky.  (Somebody told me that, so I'm using it as an excuse!)  Seriously, I think my system was smoking by the time I got everything completed. 

I feel pretty good about the progress I've made.  Barring some minor technical difficulties, I plan to have my SME review the projects, then should be able to publish them.  Which, I'm quite sure will have it's own list of snafus . . .  More to come!