ScreenShow Pro

Audio Options

You can also choose to record a soundtrack to go along with the movie you record. There are several options you can define.

To access the Audio Options dialog box select Options->Audio from the main menu:

Recording Audio from Microphone

You can choose the Record Audio from Microphone option. When this is enabled you will be able to record your voice (or anything you want) using the microphone as the audio recording device

Do Not Record Audio

You can also choose to have no audio for your movie. You can do this by choosing the Do Not Record Audio option.

Setting Audio Options for Microphone

To set up your options when recording with a microphone you will need to select the Settings... options from the menu shown above. It will allow you to set the recording format and the compressed format of your audio.

Recording Format

You have several options here. What you have to know in order to properly choose the desired recording format is that there are three attributes defining the format:

The samples-per-second (SPS) option (measured in kHz). In data conversion, an analog signal is converted to a stream of numbers, each representing the analog signal's amplitude at a moment in time. Each number is called a "sample." The number sample per second is called the sampling rate, measured in samples per second.

The mono/stereo option.

The bits-per-second (BPS) option defines the frequency at which bits are passing a given "point". For speech, the usual values are 8 and 16. This, however, is a poor quality if you want to record more complex sounds.

You should be aware that by increasing the SPS and BPS values you will also increase the size of the final file.

Compression

Aside from choosing the recording format, this option allows you to choose the format that will be saved with your movie. After the recording is done using the options in the Recording Format section, the audio will be compressed using the Compressed Format options. When clicking on the Choose Compressed Format button you will be asked to choose a format. You can either use a saved format from the Name list, or you can simply use a predefined format. You have a list of existing formats in the Format list and you can further describe the format you desire by selecting the Attributes (they are the same as the one discussed in the Recording Format paragraph above).

Interleave Video and Audio

You measure the Interleave Factor using frames or milliseconds. The interleave factor determines the amount of interleaving in your movie. Normally, this value is specified in number of frames. A value of 1 frame will mean full interleave. This will determine how smooth you movie will play. Larger values will mean less interleaving.

You can also specify the Interleave Factor in milliseconds. If you choose to interleave a movie every 100ms for a movie with a capture rate of 200 frames per second (capture frames every 5 milliseconds), the Interleave Factor will be equivalent to interleave every 20 frames.

Use system method for audio recording

It is advisable to use this option if you don’t really know how to set up the recording options. If you experience low quality audio recording using your options in ScreenShow Pro you might want to check this option. You might get better results. It will use the system commands to (MCI Recording) perform the recording. When this method is selected ScreenShow Pro will ignore all the Audio Options for Microphone settings except the Interleave Factor.

Please note that you can set up the system input device in Control Panel->Sound and Audio Devices->(Audio Tab).

NOTE: Some sound cards disallow your system to record while another application is playing sounds. In this case ScreenShow Pro will issue an error when you attempt to record with the Record Audio option being enabled.

Audio and Video Synchronization

If you the audio is not in phase with the video during playback, you have the possibility to synchronize them by using the Audio and Video Synchronization menu. You can access it by choosing Tools->Audio and Video Synchronization... from the context menu.

The SWF Producer is a program that converts AVI to flash. You can choose that option if you want to start the SWF Generator and convert your AVI to SWF.

The default option is Do not shift the audio or video stream. You should change this only if you experience problems.

Note that the dialog only handles the case when the audio goes before the video, allowing you to delay the video recording, thus synchronizing the audio and video recordings.

The shift amount is measured in milliseconds. You can usually set the synchronization after viewing the video several times.