How I record my own talks

I started to record my own talks for publishing a year ago. But obviously I do not want to carry around a huge case of expensive equipment to make this happening. So I experimented a while to figure out a setup that works for me. I wrote this post for anybody interested.

Environment

Windows 10 Laptop

Recording Software

Camtasia from TechSmith. It is not free, but a great tool to record

• screen
• webcam
• audio

and allow easy post processing. Afterwards you can simply create a mp4 file.

I record my screen for slides as well as live hacking, which I normally do in my talks. I therefor mirror my display on the projector to not get confused.

Camera

I use my normal Logitech HD 920 webcam which can be mounted on this Coolway stand. That the logitech webcam can be mounted on stands is one of the great things about it. Positioning of the camera is typically a bit tricky, but a chair in the front row, a spare flip-chart, an unused microphone stand or whatever you can find might do a good job. This in an example from QCon London:

Microphone

I stumbled over the Samson Stage XPD1 Presentation which is a really great product. Is a wireless microphone which is plugged into USB and therefor qualifies as normal microphone for Camtasia.

Microphone for second speaker

Another tricky part was to have a second microphone for a second speaker. On the positive side you can connect two Samson microphones with one computer.

But there is a big problem: Camtasia cannot handle multiple microphones. I could add an additional audio recorded somewhere else later on, but my experience was, that it is really hard to get the audio files synced in time. So I use another approach: Virtual Audio Cable can simply merge multiple audio inputs into a new one. That way, multiple microphones look to Camtasia as one.

If you don’t want to invest in Samson mics, you can also try software to turn your smartphone into a bluetooth microphone, I played around with Wireless Orange WO Mic. I connected a simple microphone with cable to my smartphone and are ready to go. But I had a couple of problems with this setup, so I do not use it any more (the microphone unplugged itself from the smartphone during talks and the bluetooth connection sometimes had a delay or quality problems).

Pricing

Components I had anyway:

• Camtasia: 250 €
• Logitech webcam: 100 €

Components I just bought:

• Stand for webcam: 20€
• Samson mic: 100 € each
• Virtual Audio Cable: 25 €

The result

This is an example from the QCon London:

And from KanDDDinsky Berlin with two speakers

As always, I love getting your feedback. Comment below or send me an email.

Stay up to date with my newsletter.