Tools for Multi-Media Presentations and Publications

As educators and researchers, we often are called upon to produce training materials, presentations, and publications using images from our Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS), snapshots from unique systems to be featured or described, or illustrations on how to perform tasks. Many of these images, systems, and task descriptions are available on our computers and need to be captured and shared.

At the SIIM 2010 annual meeting, a video capture system was used to record the presentations to be posted on siimweb.org for members to view. The meeting was rich with content, and no one could attend all the sessions, so this was the method SIIM used to make the content available to all of us including members unable to attend the meeting. The video capture system used was Camtasia Studio from the company TechSmith (http://www.techsmith.com). As great as Camtasia Studio is, TechSmith offers much more than video capture and editing. Another of their products, SnagIt, captures and edits still images from a computer screen or a selected part of the screen. Jing is a limited video capture system for creating short videos and sharing them through http://www.screencast.com.

Why would I feature this commercial company in a TechBits column? Because Snagit from TechSmith has long been my application of choice for screen capture and editing to create training materials. It is possible that the University of Florida was one of the first departments to have a multiple license agreement so Snagit could be installed on all PACS workstations and faculty computers for creating teaching files, presentations, and publications. There are other screen capture and editing programs out there, but for me, they do not measure up to Snagit. After capturing a screen or a region of interest from a computer screen, the user can edit the image, add text and color, add shapes and arrows, or erase parts of the image (for example, to remove patient identification). A captured image can be saved in almost any image format or sent directly to a word, excel, or powerpoint file, or it can be included in an Instant Message (IM), sent to an email address, or printed. Figure 1 is a screen capture from Manuscript Central that was annotated to show a new reviewer how to navigate the site.

Fig 1

This screenshot was captured and edited with Snagit to help a new reviewer navigate the manuscript central website.

Camtasia is a video capture and editing tool that allows a user to capture action that appears on the computer screen as well as audio from a microphone and video from a webcam. This is particularly useful for creating materials describing how a program or system works or to capture a movie (for example, a beating heart from a Gated Cardiac CT study) to include for training or for a multimedia presentation or publication. As mentioned above, Camtasia was used to capture the presentations from the recent SIIM 2010 annual meeting, and you can view the results of using Camtasia for creating training materials by viewing Tony Seibert’s tutorials on preparing figures for publication on http://www.siimweb.org/index.cfm?id=5938. Dr. Seibert used Camtasia to record the steps to creating publication quality figures as well as his voice as he explains how each step works. With Camtasia, a video from a webcam can be included, possibly so an author can record himself introducing a topic or to include himself in a video box in the corner of the final project. The Camtasia editor is a powerful video editor that allows a person to remove sections, add callouts or title slides, and use readymade audio and visual effects. All effects and callouts can be added to the video by placing them on a timeline of the video. Camtasia has YouTube integration built in, so posting a completed video is automatic and easy.

If you need a simpler way to capture short (5 min or less) videos to share, you may want to try yet another TechSmith product, Jing. Jing is a free image/video/audio capture tool that allows you to capture action on your screen and instantly share it using email, Twitter, Facebook, or online conversations. It can be used in collaboration with a group of people, sharing a snapshot of a document, narration of photos, explaining how something on the computer works, or commenting verbally on another’s posting (for example, a student’s homework). Jing ties in closely with http://www.screencast.com to post videos for others to see or to keep in a personal video library. Screencast.com, also a TechSmith product, is free if the user is storing less than 2 GB of video clips and images. The great thing about the pairing of Jing and Screencast.com is that after creating a video and uploading it in Screencast.com, a link is provided that can be placed in an email, IM, Facebook, or blog posting so the video is only accessed if someone clicks on the link. Posting a link instead of the entire video uses much less bandwidth and space. The free version of Jing cannot be used to post to YouTube; however, JingPro costs less than US$15.00 per year and gives the user the ability to instantly post to YouTube using MPEG-4 video and to record video using a Webcam.

All three products work on Windows or a MacIntosh, although Snagit for the Mac is in its Beta stage at this time. TechSmith will allow a user to download their products and try them for 30 days for free.