Prepare a project on the system on which the recording is to be made: import all slides into the project so you do not have to do it shortly before the recording starts. If you do not have the slides at hand during the preparation, create an empty project first, and then add a "dummy" source document in order to prepare all project settings even without the slides.

For test recordings and/or changes in your project, always use this project in orer to avoid that setting changes are discarded and have to be recreated before the final live recording.

The most important part of the preparation of a live recording are the audio settings, including a microphone check. Without proper audio, your recording will have degraded quality, or in extreme cases can even be useless.

In order to receive the best possible audio quality, the following steps are suggested:

1. Assemble your equipment in time before the recording; pay attention to cable qualities, especially when you use a high quality microphone and/or a microphone without a separate current entry. In order to realize an exact audio level adjustment, an audio mixer may be necessary
2. If you use a wireless microphone, check the batteries. Make sure that they will at least last for the time span of the live recording. Calculate with a large security margin and/or keep spare batteries at hand.
3. Make multiple test recordings with LECTURNITY in order to get a good audio level in the recording. The next section will address this aspect in more detail.

Start LECTURNITY and load the project which you prepared for your live recording. Make sure your sound card uses the correct audio source. You may verify this in the project settings:

If you cannot select the audio source of your sound card here, you will have to do this in the Sound settings of Windows directly. Make sure audio recording is enabled at all.
Set the audio recording level to a medium value by moving the slider right of the audio source setting to a medium position.

Make a short recording with LECTURNITY. Try to speak as loud as you would to an audience, keeping parameters such as external loudspeakers and size of the room in mind. You can see the current audio level in the LECTURNITY Monitor Widget. It should mainly remain in the green area, but may bounce up in the red area from time to time. It should not constantly be red; this results in an overdriven audio signal.

Open the test recording with the LECTURNITY Edit View and look at the audio track. At normal speech, it should display a significant signal. The signal should not touch the limits of the audio track all the time; this indicates an overdriven audio signal. If the signal is displayed just as a slim line with small bumps, the signal is underdriven. The following three pictures show examples of (a) an underdriven signal, (b) a good audio signal, and (c), an overdriven signal:

(a) underdriven

(b) good

(c) overdriven

Adjust the audio recording level until you get an appropriate audio signal (approximately like in (b)). This might require multiple test recordings. If you don't get a good audio signal by changing the audio recording level in LECTURNITY, check if your sound card has a microphone pre-amplifier and disable (overdriven signal) or enable (underdriven signal) it accordingly. This setting is normally found in your system control, "Sounds and Multimedia". An external audio mixer gives further possibilites of altering the audio signal (see above).

Save all settings to your project so that you can restore them quickly when you need them.If you cannot achieve a proper audio level by following the above steps, there may be several possible causes. The most probable cause is that the microphone does not provide a strong enough signal for the sound card. In this case, you will have to make use of a microphone preamplifier or a mixer. A second cause may be that your sound card has a built-in microphone preamplifier, but it is not turned on. In order to turn it on, do the following steps: Open the control panel and double-click the "Sounds and Audio Devices" icon. Then click the "Advanced..." button on the "Volume" card. In the appearing window, select the "Properties" menu item of the "Options" menu, and then select "Recording" from the radio button group.

This will bring up a window which looks like this:

Click the "Advanced..." button and check if the microphone preamplifier of your sound card is activated. If the "Advanced..." button is not present in the Recording Control, your sound card or its drivers does not support switching the amplifier on and off. If these measures does not help, using a microphone preamplifier or a mixer will help adjusting the audio signal level.

If you record a video during your live recording, it is essential that you prepare the video recording, too.

As with the audio, the following principles generally apply:

• Assemble your equipment well before the recording so that you have time to find optimal settings.
• Save all settings into your project so that you can quickly set them again at need by loading this project.

By following these steps, successful video recording can be accomplished:

Start the process manager of your computer which measures the CPU load (in percent) and keep the CPU load in view during the video test recordings. On Windows 2000 and Windows XP, you can start the program by pressing Ctrl-Shift-Esc. Minimize the process manager afterwards.

Start LECTURNITY and open your project. Display the Studio settings, and select "Audio/Video Settings". If the video section is not active, two possible reasons might apply:

• Reason 1: Your project does not contain any source documents; if you do not have the slides at hand which will be used in the live presentation, please create an empty source document ("New Source Document"), and add an empty page to that source document ("Insert", "New Slide").
• Reason 2: No video device is installed on your system, or the drivers are not properly installed. If you use a DV camera, please turn it on before you start LECTURNITY. For further hints, please refer to the Video FAQ.

Now select the video device you want to use. Please note that you have the choice between two different driver models: Video for Windows (VfW) and Windows Driver Model (WDM). Please see the VfW/WDM Guide for further information on which model to use. With Windows 2000 and Windows XP, WDM is the most common and often the best choice.
If the desired video device does not occur in the list, please make sure that the device was turned on before LECTURNITY was started. Otherwise, the device cannot be detected by the Assistant. In such cases, please restart LECTURNITY and then select the proper device.

Click on the "Record video" check box in order to load the video device drivers and to activate the video recording. In case of success, the "Codec" tab and the "Video monitor" check box are enabled. If a message box with the message "Video device records uncompressed video" appears, please ignore it for now; we will address the codec issue later.

As a next step, make sure the video signal is correctly displayed in the Monitor Widget of LECTURNITY. In order to do this, click on the "Video Monitor" check box. An additional window appears in which the video signal is shown. If this is not the case, possible reasons might be:

• Reason 1: Cables are not correctly connected; check all jacks and cables.
• Reason 2, analog cameras only: Most analog cameras are able to deliver the video signal with at least two different video standards; these are FBAS and S-Video. The jacks look as follows:
  Abbildung Kamera Anschlüsse aus dem KundenServiceCenter
  The video device in the computer has to be set to the appropriate video standard, too. These settings can be found under "Source..." (Video for Windows) or "Crossbar (Source Selection)..." (Windows Driver Model).
Please note that digital video devices, like DV cams or web-cams, do not offer this option (except for using a DV camera as an analog camera).
• Reason 3, analog cameras only: The video standard is not correct. Please verify that the video device is set to the correct video standard. In Germany, this is normally a PAL standard, like PAL-G or PAL-M, in France it is SECAM, and in the USA it is NTSC. This setting can be found under "Frame rate and Color Model..." for WDM devices.
For VfW devices, this setting depends on the driver. In most cases, it is located under "Source..." or "Format...".
Please note that this option cannot be changed for digital video devices like webcams or DV cameras.

Set an appropriate image resolution, frame rate and codec for your video device. For WDM devices, this is accomplished in the "Frame rate and Color model..." dialog. For VfW devices, click the "Format..." button. The appropriate resolution may vary, depending on your system configuration. Please keep in mind that if you double the video image size (width and height) four times the CPU capacity is needed. For example: if you use the iv50 Indeo Video 5 codec, a 800 MHz class computer should be able to compress a video of a 320x240 pixel resolution at some 50% of the CPU load, provided the Indeo option "Quick compress" is activated.

Make several test recording with different video settings (e.g. resolution) and codec settings (e.g. quality, quick compress enabled or not); check the CPU load and make sure it is not higher than 75% during the LECTURNITY recording. If the CPU load is higher than that, the video recording may not be satisfactory: it may hang and/or have dropped frames. This will result in video jerking from time to time. Verify the video quality by using the LECTURNITY Player.

When you are done, don't forget to save the video settings in your LECTURNITY Project. More information on video and codec settings can be found in the Tutorial Video settings and of course in the Video FAQs.

If all preparations have been done thoroughly, there are no reasons why anything should go wrong with your live recording. Just load your prepared LECTURNITY Project and add the respective source document for the presentation (if not already done). Make a last test recording before the live recording, just to double-check all the settings and in order to see if all devices, like audio and video, work correctly. If several similar recordings are to be done, it is advantageous to re-use the project. By doing so, you do not have to change all the settings for each new project. Simply add the new source document to the existing project, and optionally remove the old source document if you don't need it anymore.