Summary: Use any screen recording software to record your presentation and then upload to YouTube.
Difficulty: Easy

You Tube It

In the last post, we looked at how to publish YouTube video into Articulate Presenter ’09. In this article, we are going to do the opposite and publish any Articulate content to YouTube easily and quickly.

Here is a presentation I created last year which I recorded for YouTube. It was actually built as non-interactive demos in the first place so preparing this for YouTube recording was easy. You can watch in high quality by clicking on the HQ button as well as view in Full Screen (the button to the right of the HQ button).

You can see the original version here.

 

YouTube is essentially a form of podcasting in video format. Presenter ’09 has an audio podcasting feature already. If you go to Articulate -> Publish -> Podcast, you can create an audio podcast containing all the audio in your Presenter ’09 slides (it won’t contain any audio that you have recorded in Engage and which you have subsequently included in Presenter). But if we want a video podcast, then we’re going to use different methods.

Adapt Your Content

Remember that YouTube is essentially a video provider. It does not allow you to look at interactive presentations or take quizzes or do anything that requires input from the user. This means that your Articulate presentations will need to be adapted for YouTube output so that they really look like they’re playing off the TV.

If you’re adapting existing content for YouTube output (and of course it can be any online video site or podcasting site like iTunes), you’ll probably need to do the following things:

1. Take a backup of your original product and then take a second copy and make it your YouTube version.
2. Remove any quizzes and Learning Games from the course.
3. Remove or edit any menus you have in the course which rely on hyperlinks for navigation.
4. Remove any slides explaining navigation in the course. Navigation is lost in the YouTube version.
5. Have all Engage interactions playing in presentation mode.
   
   1. Open the interaction in Engage
   2. Click on the Interaction Properties button
   3. Select Playback -> Presentation – interaction advances by itself

 



 

6. Have all your slides move on automatically as set in Slide Properties.

 



 

Quick Tip: If you want to change the Advance setting for all your slides, select all the slides in the Advance column by clicking on the word Advance at the top of the column and then right-click to select advance automatically.

7. Set the player template to show your published presentation at optimum size. (Articulate -> Player Template -> Other -> Presentation Size -> Lock presentation at optimal size). This should ensure we get maximum quality when we come to record.

The objective of adapting the content is that we are left with a presentation which will run by itself. We’re going to record the presentation in a video capture program and then upload that video to YouTube. Having it play by itself will make the recording stage easier. Naturally we’re going to lose many of the great features we can find in Articulate presentations like branching from one slide to another, creating sophisticated quiz modules etc.

Record Your Content

So your presentation is playing by itself. Let’s move onto the recording stage. You are going to need some third-party software to do this as there is no screen recording software in the Articulate suite. The software that I am going to use in this demo is called Jing from Techsmith. Jing is a very basic but easy-to-use screen recorder. There are two versions, a free one and a pro. The pro version has a few handy extras like recording to MPEG-4 and automatic uploading to YouTube and it is the version you’ll need here. The free version only records to SWF, a format which is not compatible with YouTube.

1. If you haven’t got one already, set up an account on YouTube. You’ll need that to upload content. Get yourself a username and a password.
2. Install Jing
3. Customize your Jing buttons so that YouTube is available and enter your YouTube username and password.

 



 

4. Choose MPEG-4 as the video format as this works best with YouTube.
5. Select Stereo Mix as your default recording device in Windows.
   

   If your Articulate presentation has audio in it, then we’ll need to set Jing to record that too. We don’t want to use a basic microphone to record that audio as the output will be poor. We need to record the output directly from the computer. We can’t do this directly since Jing just uses the default microphone so we need to change the default microphone in Windows first.

   In Windows Vista and XP:

   1. Go to the Control Panel
   2. Open Sounds
   3. Click on the Recording tab
   4. Make Stereo Mix your default recording tab and if necessary diable other microphones (right-click to set default and disable).

    

   

    

   
   (If Stereo Mix is not visible, then right-click on any microphone and select “Show disabled devices” . If your computer has this feature, it should now be visible. Enable it and make it default)
6. Launch your presentation and run some tests to ensure that it is recording both the screen and the audio correctly. You’ll also want to practice setting the capture area just over the part of the Articulate presentation you want to cover.
7. When testing is finished, get ready to record for real.
   
   • Launch your presentation in your browser and then launch Jing to record.
   • Make sure the microphone is not muted (the microphone now being the Stereo Mix device we set up in step 5).
   • There is a three second countdown. Just before you reach 0 (maybe a second before), relaunch your browser.
   • That will relaunch your presentation and the beginning of the presentation should more or less coincide with the beginning of the capture.
8. Watch your presentation as it is recorded. (Don’t forget that you disconnected your regular microphone so you can talk or shout at your boss while you wait.)
9. When the presentation is finished, click on the stop button and then review the content.
10. If you’re happy, click on the YouTube share button and your presentation will be automatically uploaded to YouTube.

Notes

• You can use the same technique to just record Engage presentations on YouTube. Quizzes will be more difficult unless you walk the view through the questions and explain the answers and feedback.
• You can use whatever screen recording software you already have. Ideally record to mpeg-4 or FLV.

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