Recording instructional videos like khanacademy

Question

I want to create instructional videos exactly like the videos from khanacademy.org.

http://www.khanacademy.org/about/faq#equipment says that sal khan uses Camtasia Recorder ($200) + SmoothDraw3(Free) + a Wacom Bamboo Tablet ($80) on a PC

1. I've purchased a wacom bamboo pen tablet.
2. I've also installed SmoothDraw software for using it as a white board.

What now?

I mean, how should I go about recording the videos? Should I use screen capturing tool like camstudio? If yes, then I've few queries.

1. In khan's videos, I don't see any window/title bar/panels, its just plain blank black screen. But when if I use screen recording software it will record the GUI of SmoothDraw also. But I don't want it and yes, there is no full screen mode in SmoothDraw.

2. Sal khan changes the pen colors as he wishes. I don't see he reaching for pen or changing brush size or color tools. How does he do that?

3. I can copy an image into smoothdraw and then explain things by writing on it. Is it possible that I can play a video in the background I write on it? I mean, say I've created animation video of a block sliding now when it is sliding I want to point out/ mark some thing on the video. Can I do that?

4. If I want to show some animations or videos to students. Do I have to edit them using video editing software (sounds like hectic work) or is there any automated way to do this?

5. Once my canvas/board is filled, I cannot find a way to get a new canvas.

6. I just noticed that there is no way to draw simple shapes like (circles, ovals, squares, straight lines etc.) in SmoothDraw. Can any one suggest some good alternative with lot more features than SmoothDraw?

Kindly suggest me proper software (Price no bar) and workflow to achieve the task.

EDIT: Because no one answered so far, I've been experimenting with different softwares. I just tried MS Paint + Camtasia recorder. Here is the resulted video.

observations is that when I'm writing in mspaint without running the camtasia recorder, its writing fine. But when I'm recording the video and writing its becoming dead slow, I mean even though I'm writing fast with the pen on the tablet they are being written on the screen very slowly. And even the handwriting is also is quite ugly, the letters are getting distorted.

I've tried smoothdraw3 instead of mspaint and letters are distorted even more and handwriting is becoming even more ugly. (letter are little smooth though)

I'm using Pentium 4 (3.0GHz; 1MB L2 cache), 1.25GB RAM, Windows XP SP3, CPU usage while recording is 100%. Is this low configuration for recording, If so, what is the recommended configuration? I don't understand how letters are being distorted because of this low configuration?

Final EDIT:

1. All the slowing down and distortion in writing was purely because utterly low configuration of my computer. Now, I've bought a new one with 4GB ram & Graphics card. Everything is working smoothly.

2. No, there is no perfect single program which can be used to do all the things simply. I'm sticking to SmoothDraw3 because of its really smooth drawing.

Answer 1

Several comments :

Your computer's specs seem a bit low for video work. High quality video is very demanding and requires oodles of memory, good video card and fast CPU. RAM of 1.25GB is simply far from enough, and I don't have enough information about the rest. But if the computer is not recent, it will also not have fast RAM.

Many sophisticated video programs are capable of leveraging the CUDA parallel computing capabilities of video cards. But a recent enough video card is is required for CUDA. However, this thread seems to indicate that Camtasia Studio does not use CUDA, so it uses exclusively the CPU and RAM, which evidently are not fast enough.

What you can do, apart from getting a new computer, is to limit severely the area of the screen that is being recorded. The smaller it is, less pixels need to be recorded. You can also lower the number of frames-per-second (FPS) in order to lighten the load on the video encoder.

You can also experiment with other screen recording software, to find one that is more efficient. A list of good and free recorders can be found in the article Best Free Screen Session Recorder. I suggest reading attentively the comments below the article.

A good and free paint program that I recommend is Paint.NET, a freebie that can compete with many commercial products.

You also seem to wish to use the whiteboard in a transparent manner over a playing video. It is possible that a whiteboard product that supports background transparency exists, and maybe a starting point toward finding one is in the article Best Free All-In-One Design Tools.

Answer 2

Here's some good information from credible sources.

Robert Talbert is an extremely bright guy who has written some long blog posts about screencasting.

Check out http://castingoutnines.wordpress.com/tag/screencast/ and maybe other posts on his blog.

He uses a Mac, so you may have to look for alternatives to some of the software he uses, but there is practical wisdom in his words.

There's an un-conference called ScreencastCamp (which just happened). Here are someone's public notes from it. The doc looks like it contains info that will become more valuable as your knowledge increases. https://docs.Google.com/document/d/1JvvO08u1VSuH4onE2zQ0QLbzD_-lbDytKl2md9i92Tc/edit?hl=en_US

There is also a labnol page about screencasting for Windows users, which also looks very instructive. I can't post the link because, as a new user, I have a 2 link limit. Google this and it should be right at the top:

http://www.labnol.org/software/screencasting-toolkit/18831/