Trivantis Lectora Inspire (which begins at $2,174 for a lifetime license) is one of the best eLearning authoring tools on the market. It's a vibrant, easy-to-use, powerful tool that should handle most, if not all, of your eLearning authoring needs. One of the best parts about Trivantis Lectora Inspire is that, when you purchase the software, you gain access to a full build of TechSmith Camtasia Studio, which is a solid, standalone content authoring tool in its own right. More importantly, TechSmith Camtasia Studio is among the best do-it-yourself video editing tools, which means that a combination of Trivantis Lectora Inspire and TechSmith Camtasia Studio gives you the functionality to turn your static courses into interactive movies.
In this article, we'll look at four ways you can use your Trivantis Lectora Inspire software to build, edit, and supplement your video courses. Within these four buckets there is an almost limitless number of things you can do with your editing software. However, the goal of this article isn't to teach you how to edit video, but rather, how you can use the combination of Trivantis Lectora Inspire and TechSmith Camtasia Studio to insert videos into your course content.
1. Record Your Screen
If your goal is to demonstrate software or to guide someone along a multistep pathway online, then screen recordings can be an excellent resource. In Trivantis Lectora Inspire, recording your screen is a very simple process. First, press the Insert tab. Then, select "Video" from the dropdown menu. Next, select "New Screen Recording."
TechSmith Camtasia Studio will launch. You'll then be prompted to press "Record" whenever you're ready to begin your demonstration. Once you're done recording, you can make all kinds of edits and apply all sorts of effects to your screen recording. You can add annotations, captions, video narration, and call-outs (such as the one in the image above). You can also edit cursor movements in your quizzes, either by removing them completely or by making them appear only after the course taker has completed his or her own cursor prompts.
Once you're done editing, click "Share" and then select "Lectora Output." Your video will then save as an MP4 file. Click the Video dropdown menu in Trivantis Lectora Inspire and select your new video.
2. Edit Existing Video
If you've already got a library of videos that you'd like to add to your eLearning courses, then Trivantis Lectora Inspire and TechSmith Camtasia Studio can help you edit and add quizzes to these courses in just a few steps. First, press "Edit." If you have a video in Trivantis Lectora Inspire, then it's still on your hard drive as a normal file. If you choose the option to edit that video from the Trivantis Lectora Inspire interface, then it will launch whichever video editor you have set up in Trivantis Lectora Inspire. If you browse to that video file in the Trivantis Lectora Inspire title folder on your hard drive, then it will launch with whatever video editor you have specified in Windows. If your video is stored on your desktop or on an external drive, then the software will open directly to TechSmith Camtasia Studio.
Once the video loads, you'll be able to make a wide variety of edits and add any of Trivantis Lectora Inspire's quiz and interaction elements to the video file (more on this in section 4). Once you're done editing, click "Share" and then select "Lectora Output." Your video will then save as an MP4 file. Click the Video dropdown menu in the Trivantis Lectora Inspire tool and select your screen recording. If you made the edits directly inside of Trivantis Lectora Inspire, then simply save your video when you're done editing.
3. Edit Video Only
If your only goal is to edit video, regardless of whether or not you're going to insert the final file into Trivantis Lectora Inspire, then you can use TechSmith Camtasia Studio as an independent program. To do this, open TechSmith Camtasia Studio on your computer. Load the video file you'd like to edit. Make all of the edits you'd like to make and then repeat the export process I mentioned in the first two sections of this article.
4. Add a Quiz
What good is a video course if you can't test your learners? To add a video quiz to any videos within Trivantis Lectora Inspire, you'll want to follow these steps: First, open your video in TechSmith Camtasia Studio and select the Interactivity tab. Next, select "Add Quiz to Timeline." Here you'll be able to select the exact location on the video's timeline where the quiz or quizzes will be located. There are two ways to do this. The first way is to place your cursor on the video timeline where you'd like to add a quiz. Then, go to the right of the tool to create the question, answer, and quiz (or event name). The second way to do this is to go to Trivantis Lectora Inspire, select "Insert Video," then "Edit," and then "Event."
From here, you'll be able to give a name to the event and select the exact time code where you'd like the event placed. Select "OK." Repeat as many as times as necessary. Then, go back to the dashboard. Click "Synch Events." From the window, use the Action dropdown menu to select "Show" and then select the quiz question from the target. Repeat this process as many times as necessary until all of the questions have been added. (This process assumes you already have a quiz question on the page which is set to initially be hidden).
(Editor's Note: Trivantis Lectora Inspire versions 12 and 16 include TechSmith Camtasia Studio 8. Trivantis Lectora Inspire version 17 includes TechSmith Camtasia Studio 9.)