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| News You Can Use |
March 2009 | Issue 62 |
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| Letter from the Editor: Where in the World is TechSmith? |
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Dave McCollom, Education Evangelist for TechSmith |
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Technically the answer to that question is Okemos, MI (Just outside of East Lansing — home of Michigan State University). But in reality, we're all over the place! People use TechSmith products in more than 180 countries and in five different languages (English, German, French, Japanese, and Korean). In fact, we even have French and German Newsletters! Our products have been on the road for awhile, and we're starting to join them. In 2008 we attended Learning Technologies and World of Learning in the United Kingdom, Bildung Online in Germany, Le Web in Paris, and Microsoft TechEd in Barcelona. 2009 started off with a great trip to London for BETT and while we were there we recorded this video to give everyone a quick update on what we're up to (both internationally and in the US.
We will be back to many of those events in 2009, along with several others overseas. Are there any international events that you think we're missing out on? If you have any suggestions feel free to let me know!
Thanks,
Dave McCollom
Education Evangelist
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| User Tip: Replace the background color as you capture |
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Mark Clanton, systems analyst, ATK Space Systems - Magna |
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Mark Clanton works for an aerospace and defense company whose engineers do their design work with CAD software called CATIA. I know he is not in the education field but I found his tip interesting and thought it would be useful to you Snagit users.
Unfortunately, CATIA puts a dark-colored background behind the 3D models, which causes problems when screen captures are used in reports and presentations. Mark found an elegant solution with Snagit, and is sharing his solution with co-workers via Camtasia Studio...
We do a lot of designing in our business and the built-in image capture in CATIA is not always good enough.
I have created a Snagit capture profile that substitutes the background color with white which enables the user to capture the 3D models and place them in Powerpoint, Word and any other application for that matter.
I exported that profile and saved it to a network location for my users to import from (already configured).
I sent the users a video that I produced in Camtasia Studio that explains everything they need to import the new profile and start using it.
I love SnagIt and continue to find very useful ways to use it.
If you want to build a custom capture of your own, this tutorial will get you started. To automatically replace one solid color with another (like Mark did) choose Effects > Color Substitution when setting up the profile. To learn how to share your custom profile with another Snagit user, watch this month's featured training video.
Have a tip of your own? Drop me an email, and you could be featured in the newsletter...
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Screencast.com just got new features that make it even better for Snagit and Jing users. Plus, those of you who have a Screencast.com account.
Now if you upload a bunch of images to the same Screencast.com folder, your viewers can easily navigate between them using image thumbnails and previous/next controls.
And large images like digital photos are automatically displayed at a size that fits on the viewer's screen, so they don't have to scroll around to see the image. (Images can still be viewed at full size, too.)
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 To see the new features in action,
check out these photos of a deer meeting a cat. |
If you have a free Screencast.com account, you already have access to these new features!
New for Pro accounts
For less than $10 a month, the Screencast.com Pro account not only gives you more than 10x the storage space and 100x the monthly bandwidth...now you can also completely customize the page your content sits on. Choose your colors, upload your own logo, and display only the viewer options you want. (See an example page and a tutorial on customization.)
What is Screencast.com?
Screencast.com is a service you can use to store and share your Snagit screen captures as well as your Camtasia Studio videos (and just about any other digital content). The basic account is free!
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Over 400 people joined us on Wednesday, February 25th for the live webinar! I hope some of you were among those who could attend.
If you missed the live event, you can still catch it on demand.
Find out how easy it is for your campus to deploy a lecture capture solution which will help increase student learning and satisfaction while improving educational effectiveness.
Garrett Brand, faculty member at Grand Rapids Community College and Blake Haggerty, the assistant director of instructional design at New Jersey Institute of Technology will explain first-hand how they:
- provided faculty with a lecture capture solution they actually want to use.
- found a solution that is easy to deploy...from integration to management.
- received feedback from both faculty and students.
...and did it all on a shoestring budget because of Camtasia Relay's ease-of-use and integration with existing hardware.
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| Snagit Tutorial: Share a custom profile with another Snagit user |
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Chris McQueen, Instructional Designer |
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Custom profiles are a real time-saver, since you can combine options to make Snagit do exactly what you want with just one click. Wouldn't it be nice to share your time-saving profile with a friend or co-worker?
That's what Mark Clanton did (see the user tip above)...and you can, too!
This training video walks you through the steps to export a custom profile that can then be installed on another Snagit user's machine.
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People often ask: does Snagit do OCR (optical character recognition)? In other words, can Snagit convert a picture that contains text into editable text?
The short answer to that is no—Snagit does not contain an OCR engine for converting, say, a scanned document into text. But if you have Microsoft Office 2003 or 2007, then you have access to an OCR tool. It's called Microsoft Office Document Imaging (MODI).
This video tutorial shows you how to use Snagit and MODI together. By creating a custom profile you can make a "pipeline" that sends your screen capture from Snagit directly into MODI where the OCR happens. It's a very efficient way to get from "text I can see but can't select" to "text I can copy and paste."
When would you use OCR?
Let's say someone sends you a screenshot of an archived webpage and you need to take all the text and put it on a new webpage. You could either re-type all the text...or use Snagit + MODI to convert it in a fraction of the time.
Or maybe you're looking at page scans taken from a public domain book and want to quote an excerpt without typing it out. A couple of clicks and you've got text. The text will probably have some typos, since OCR technology is not perfect—but if it's still quicker than typing, you're ahead of the game!
When would you use something else?
If the text on your screen can be selected, your best bet is to just copy (CTRL-C) and paste (CTRL-V) it.
If the text cannot be selected but you're pretty sure it's actual text (i.e., not a graphic with text in it), then use Snagit's Text Capture mode instead of OCR.
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Camtasia Studio
Recording and Presentation
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Jing Pro
Share Recordings Faster
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SnagIt
Screen Capture and Sharing
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Screencast.com
Media Hosting
Buy Now |
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