Video recording tools and tips

Video Recordings, Editing & Online Teaching Setup - Getting started, examples, best practice

Looking to record videos? Here are some different options (co-written by Dr Victoria Clout [UNSW] and Dr Amanda White [UTS]):

Here are some guides I wrote for FREE software for recording (OBS Studio) and editing videos (OpenShot). OBS Studio is a recording only and streaming tool - it can stream onto websites like Youtube and Twitch. OpenShot is used to edit videos and can only edit, no ability to record.
* Screencastomatic - this is a seriously underrated product and is cheap compared to Camtasia. Renders files quickly and you can record voice over anything - PowerPoint, excel, web browsers. Other academics have highly recommend it: https://screencast-o-matic.com
* Zoom recording - sit in your office use Zoom to record your shared screen (PowerPoints, excel, websites etc). Zoom can capture in addition to your video image powerpoint slides or Word file or web-browser shared on the screen. To do this capture set up a Zoom meeting, but it’s just you alone in the meeting room. See here for a guide for Zoom I put together, make sure you click on the 'download to local computer' button when you setup the meeting see here. Con - because you’re recording to the cloud - the playback isn’t entirely smooth - but good enough and the files aren’t too large (reflecting the avg quality). They are also processing a massive amount of traffic - it can take days to get your recording from the server.

Microsoft Teams Meeting with just yourself and click ‘record’ - Create a new Team for yourself and use it to have a Meeting (like Zoom) - share your screen and then press record. It will save the recording to Stream (Microsoft’s video repository tool at UNSW) and you can download it from there. You’ll have your recording within the hour and there is a basic editing tool inside Stream as well. Here is a guide Imade on how to do this - download here.
Kaltura capture – Academics have recommend this as being easy to use and there aren’t the delays of waiting for Zoom cloud recordings. I haven’t tested it myself. Here is a link:
Camtasia - Gold star! I love this software and I use it all the time. It’s one of the original capture software developer - it’s great but super expensive. Feel like treating yourself? It’s a self-funded software as sadly, UNSW Business School is no longer a subscriber to this software. The Education rate is $220. You could take advantage of their free 30-day trial and test it out link here.
Voice over PowerPoint using the inbuilt recording function. Pros - super easy to use, if you have a Surface Pro you can annotate as well. Con – file sizes can be large, especially if you include your face video talking on each slide. Also exporting the files is the pits! (Painful to do). It takes forever and you can’t do anything else on your computer because it needs to be the main window open. You can give students the PowerPoint files with video & annotations - but it is big - 35 slides was an hour and a bit of talking and 800MB. File sizes can be large.
Remote tool for Echo360 - here is a guide to how to download Echo360's universal capture program here. There is also a Youtube video about how to use the Remote Echo360 this here. Cons – difficult to setup and file sizes can be large.

Improvise Your Own Document Camera

Looking to improve a document camera to film hand written notes on your phone or iPad or tablet? Here are some suggestions - use every day objects such as paper boxes: