My YouTube Trials and Tribulations
January 16th, 2009 by plivingstonHello friends and neighbors. I come to you today with a heavy heart.
I’ve spent about 20 hours per day for the last five days trying to accomplish the following:
- Create a Camtasia video
- Get said video up to YouTube
- Display said YouTube video on this blog
Please keep in mind I had never done any of these things before. And, sadly, I was able to accomplish all but number three. But first let me tell you about numbers one and two…
Camtasia is a great program, or so I’m told. I watched each of the first six tutorials on how to use it at least two times each. But things didn’t exactly work out exactly as depicted in the tuts. For me, anyway.
It could, of course, be my machine. It’s old and woefully lacking in certain areas. First, it only has one gig of RAM. Second, the video card only has 32 megs of on-board RAM. BUT, it’s a screamer! It has dual Pentium 4 Xeon chips and can keep up with even the latest, greatest technology. Maybe just not in the full-motion video arena.
Okay, so my first—and biggest—problem was (is) computer response. I was trying to make an on-screen tutorial about autoresponders and how to set them up. It turned out to be impossible because with my browser (FireFox 2) and Camtasia (Studio 5) running everything slowed to a crawl. I’d click a link in FireFox and it would take up to a minute to load the page! I tried closing all other programs, tried lowering my screen resolution down to 1028×764 and cutting my color depth down to as low as it will go. No joy; nothing helped.
So I scrapped that idea and tried a Photoshop tutorial. Recording goings-on in Photoshop was at least doable, but still very slow and choppy. Maybe with practice I could get used to it, but I’d have to spend a lot of time editing out all the wait times between clicks and responses.
My quest to find out how to fix the problem continues. My next trouble was with YouTube. Trying to find out the best format and resolution for YouTube took hours. And I’m still not sure; it seems every video I watched on the subject recommended something different. But I was able to get my lame video up and watchable. The audio even works. Tip: until I learn more, I’m using the .mov format.
Please click the link at the end of this post to watch the video.
Okay, that takes me to my last problem—getting the video to display here.
After many long hours of hair-pulling and head-banging, I finally found out why my embed code kept disappearing from my post here. (A big THANK YOU to all you Fortunate500 members for trying to help!) It wasn’t anything I was doing wrong. And it wasn’t any glitch in YouTube’s embed code.
It turns out the owner of the company hosting this blog (myccblog) does not allow Java scrips to run here. All that work for nothing! I messaged the owner requesting that he allow Java til at least February 2nd. I’ve not received a response from him yet but if you return here and see a video, you’ll know he said yes. No vid means either he didn’t answer or his answer was no.
One last thing: just before I sat down to write this, I put my video up on MetaCafe. I tried their embed code because it didn’t look like it had any script in it. That didn’t work either. Methinks my efforts in this endeavor are doomed.
Lesson Learned: NEVER host your stuff with anyone other than yourself.
Thanks for reading. Oh, BTW, the video is about How To Make A Video Without a Camera Using Photoshop and Camtasia.
Paul H. Livingston











Since Module 4, when Alex came out about Twitter, I’ve been doing a lot of research and found this short report. It’s about how to use Twitter to boost your blog traffic. It also comes with Master Resale Rights. But be sure to read the rules on page 3 before you distribute it.

