Day 29 – Screencasting and Video Editing on the Surface Pro
30 Days of Teaching and Learning with a Windows 8 Tablet4/09/2013
Welcome to Day 29 of working with a Microsoft Surface Pro Windows 8 tablet for educators, almost home, one more day.
Welcome to Day 29 of working with a Microsoft Surface Pro Windows 8 tablet for educators, almost home, one more day.
I have been creating educational screencasts for the past 30 days using the Surface Pro Windows 8 tablet as part of this blog series. I have kept this relatively quiet as I wanted to thoroughly test the capabilities of the Surface Pro’s i5 processor. For the most part I have been satisfied with the results. The screencasting application I have been using most this month is Camtasia Studio, by Techsmith, and Version 8 is compatible with Windows 8 on the Surface Pro.
There is something magical about using the Surface Pro with its digital Pen in combination with Camtasia Studio to record screencasts. It is easy to use and the digital Pen is a natural for marking selections and annotating on the screen. There is a cost however as the street price for Camtasia Studio is $180 US.
If you checkout my blog posts for Day 22, Day 24, and Day 27 you will see examples of embedded YouTube videos that I created using the Surface Pro and Camtasia Studio. Day 26, I used Ink2Go to record the screencast and you can tell a difference, especially in audio quality. I used the exact same headset (Logitech H330) to record all episodes so the difference was in the codec used to encode the screencast with Camtasia clearly sounding better.
In the future I may consider screencasting my OneNote sessions as the digital Pen writes fluidly on the Surface Pro and I could record my voice at the same time. I could then share out both my screencast video and my OneNote notebook with students.
Another possibility is grading student papers using Microsoft Word by recording a screencast of a grading session and using the built-in drawing tools in MS Word to markup notes on a students paper. I could then share the grading session screencast along with emailing the students paper back to them as a PDF attachment with inked notes included.
I did try to use Camtasia on the Samsung Ativ Windows 8 tablet however the Clover Trail processor was under powered for the intense processing required for screencasting. I could do short screencasts, but anything over a minute or two was too cumbersome to edit and produce, not so with the Surface Pro.
With the popularity of the flipped classroom creating screencasts is becoming more common for the average teacher. Having tools like the Surface Pro and Camtasia Studio make this time-intensive task much easier and faster. The Core i5 processor along with 4GB of RAM in the Surface Pro is appreciated when I create the screencasts.
Of course, more is usually better in the computing world so an i7 processor with 8GB or more of RAM would make the video editing work go even faster but the battery-life on such a tablet beast would probably be 5 minutes and would likely melt in your hands. There is a reason high-powered desktops have lots of air circulation and big fans for cooling.
I have also been experimenting with Ink2Go, a very affordable program that works only on the desktop-side of Windows 8 with a few caveats. Ink2Go is not fully compatible with Windows 8 but with a street price of $20 US Ink2Go is worthy of consideration for those on a budget.
For my video editing I have been using a combination of the Camtasia Studio and the free Microsoft Live Movie Maker video editing program. Editing videos is a time intensive tasks and rendering five to ten minute screencast usually takes about a 1:1 ratio time for encoding. That is, if I record a seven minute screencast it will usually render in under seven minutes using Live Movie Maker.
The Surface Pro will get warm as you edit videos and create screencasts. The i5 processor will heat up as it works overtime to process the video. This causes the back of the Surface Pro to become warm and a fan will kink on to help cool the processor. I usually have the keyboard cover on and flipped over the back so this is less noticeable.
The Surface Pro will get warm as you edit videos and create screencasts. The i5 processor will heat up as it works overtime to process the video. This causes the back of the Surface Pro to become warm and a fan will kink on to help cool the processor. I usually have the keyboard cover on and flipped over the back so this is less noticeable.
Once I have the final MP4 or WMV file produced using Live Movie Maker I upload it to YouTube. That usually takes about 20 minutes for a 10 minute video as it takes time to upload the video, and then more time to process it once it has been uploaded to YouTube.
So, all-in-all the Surface Pro is a great solution for those wanting a tablet that has the muscles to produce screencasts and/or videos for the world to see if you post them on YouTube. What will you teach the world about today?
Surface Pro Rocks!
Until next time...
Keep on Learning,
Keep on Learning,
Tom Grissom, PhD
Follow me on Twitter @tomgrissom
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