Classroom Capture
Camtasia Relay 2 Brings Searchable Video to Lecture Capture
TechSmith has released Camtasia Relay 2, an update to the company's flagship lecture capture suite. The latest version adds speech to text capabilities for capturing and indexing audio in presentations. It also includes expanded Moodle support and a wide range of workflow enhancements.
Camtasia Relay is a lecture capture solution that can be used on Mac OS X and Windows systems for classroom recording. It offers LDAP integration and encoding in multiple formats, including MP3, MP4, Flash, and Windows Media, for publishing to a variety of destinations, including common learning management systems and iTunes U, among others.
The latest release lets users search for video based on words spoken by the presenter or text captured from slides. It also provides a visual index of captured materials, with thumbnails. The speech to text and audio slide search features work for the Flash and Silverlight output formats only, according to TechSmith. Silverlight output support is new to Camtasia Relay 2. Also new is enhanced support for Moodle, adding the ability to send notifications through that learning management system when new media are published.
Other new features include:
- Enhanced user profile creation and management;
- A new tool to display input levels for all attached microphones;
- Support for variables for tasks like naming files or filling in notifications; and
- Support for selecting a monitor to record when multiple displays are in use.
Camtasia Relay 2 is available now. The recorder runs on Mac OS X and various flavors of Windows, including Windows 7 and XP. The server runs on Windows Server 2003 and 2008. Academic pricing starts at $4,995 for a single-server license. A free trial is also available. Further information about Camtasia Relay 2 can be found here.
About the Author
Executive Producer David Nagel heads up the editorial department for 1105 Media's education publications — which include two daily sites, a variety of newsletters and two monthly digital magazines covering technology in both K-12 and higher education.
A 21-year publishing veteran, Nagel has led or contributed to dozens of technology, art and business publications.
He can be reached at dnagel@1105media.com. You can also connect with him on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/profile/view?id=10390192 or follow him on Twitter at @THEJournalDave (K-12) or @CampusTechDave (higher education). A selection of David Nagel's articles can be found on this site.