Recently, there was an articulate e-Learning challenge to design an interactive organisational chart and if you have not already met them, I think you need to meet our media team at BYC. Amidst the several great entries for the challenge, was Jeff’s accompany blog post with a time-lapse video of his design process. That was the second or third time I was seeing such a video and so I decided to push my learning another step forward…Learn to make time-lapse videos; after all I’m learning skills now, isn’t it?
What did I do?
I connected with Jeff asking questions and voila…A blog post was ready for time-lapse video dummies like me, explaining the basics, process and tools he used. With a few other resources, I decided to give it a try making my first time-lapse video.
What is it?
The compound word ‘time-lapse’ looks and sounds to me like a ‘time collapse’ and that is exactly what it is. A time-lapse video is a video whose complete time has been collapsed, so it plays faster than it was originally recorded.
In simple terms, it is a video playing as fast forward!
Time-lapse videos are usually not made for training purposes in the real sense, they are just meant to give you a fair idea of how it was created. Depending on the speed and your previous knowledge of the video content, you may or may not be able to pick up the details of the process but rather you’ll just enjoy and have an overview of the entire process.
The Result.
At my second try, after a few inputs and immediate feedback from the non-dummies, this was my result.
The Making of the Video.
There are two basic steps in making a time-lapse video. First you record your screen and second you edit the video. There are a few software ranging from articulate replay, screenr etc. available for screen recording and any should work well. However, I used Camtasia Studio…interestingly for both recording and editing. Let me take you through it quickly…
1. Launch Camtasia studio and click Record screen. Notice available options…to record entire screen, or record just a portion, record via your webcam, record audio with it. Select what you prefer, preferably entire screen, no audio, no webcam.
2. Once you click, recording starts and everything you do now is being recorded. Press F10 to end recording.
3. A preview screen with options to Save, Edit, Publish appears. Since we want to edit it, click on edit. It saves the file and opens it for editing.
4. You can add a music to the timeline if you wish by clicking import file.
5. To speed up the video, right-click on the video file on the timeline and click ‘clip speed’. Increase the speed as you desire as shown.
Do you need the final PowerPoint file? Click to download.
One major downside of Camtasia studio is the maximum speed attainable (999%) and inability to fade in and out the background music properly. Movie maker does that better than Camtasia, but for some reasons I have not been able to fix, movie maker has refused to work well on my system! Anyway, Camtasia studio gave me what I wanted and the result is below.
And guess what? Once I was a dummy, Now I’m no longer one; thanks to the learning experience. You shouldn’t be again either!
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