SnagIt Screen Capture

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Spotlight on Max Rottersman, Web Site Developer

Max Rottersman uses SnagIt in a way we've never seen before - to create teleprompter scripts for video blogging.

He realized that while he filmed himself speaking, he looked amateurish unless he looked directly at the camera. He explained, "Quality videos depend on well-thought-out scripting, but reading without a teleprompter makes you look either unprofessional or shifty."

After losing a bid on eBay for a $1600 teleprompter, he wondered if he could build one himself. What he came up with, he thinks, "may improve the work of many a video blogger."

He gathered together a clear CD-ROM case cover, 6 CD-ROM cases, scotch tape, his laptop, web cam... and SnagIt.

He said, "SnagIt is the Swiss Army knife of screen capture utilities. I'm sure TechSmith never dreamed their software would be used for teleprompting. Amazingly, it performs the very tricks you need."

He explained that it's impractical to use the Print Screen key because most scripts are longer than a page. However, this problem is solved with SnagIt's Auto Scroll feature. Mr. Rottersman begins by placing the written script in an HTML table, which he opens in a browser. He then uses the SnagIt 'A scrolling window' capture profile, which automatically scrolls down the window and captures the document as an image file.

"Next, I select the SnagIt effect Rotate and Flip. Then I hit Mirror twice (moves image right, then back left) and Flip once. That leaves me with a mirror image of the document that reads correctly when mirrored on the teleprompter glass, or plastic," he said.

Mr. Rottersman conceded that SnagIt isn't the only graphics program that can flip and rotate images. "But for some reason," he said, "though I'm very skilled in coding, it takes me hours to do the simplest task in Photoshop. SnagIt has always been easy to figure out. My images were the way I wanted them in under a minute."

By setting up the CD cases to serve as a mirror for the screen, Mr. Rottersman was able to look directly at the web cam and read the script through the mirror-like plastic.

"With SnagIt, video bloggers with limited budgets will not have to sacrifice eye-contact for good scripting - they can now do both," he finished.

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