Marketing Defined

More and more multimedia presentations and tutorials are now produced by the industry leader Techsmith’s software package: Camtasia Studio.  Necessitating the download and saving of Camtasia produced affiliate marketing tutorials to my Desktop - so they might be burned to DVD and viewed later (in comfort on a big screen), at a convenient time.

Here are the necessary steps to save Camtasia videos to your desktop .  These manual steps by the way, only apply to the Internet Explorer browser.

Update: Refer to the following post for a far speedier and simple method to save camtasia video tutorials or any other video or audio files using the Firefox browser

To make it easier to identify all the files that make up a Camtasia tutorial - and - if you are doing this for the first time - it is best to completely clear out/delete all temporary files from your IE “Temporary Internet Files” folder (which we’ll call the “TIF” folder for the purpose of this tutorial). Here’s how:

1. Open an IE browser window. Click on the “Tools” tab and select “Internet Options” from the drop-down menu. The following box pops-up . Click on the “Delete” button in the “Browsing History” section (as circled in red below):

2. Next: clean out your “TIF” folder by clicking on “Delete files” tab in “Temporary Internet Files” section as shown here:

Now might be a good time to note: If the tutorial video is large, be sure to allocate enough “disk space to use” for saved files (done via the “settings” tab under browsing history in the pop up box) — The .flv file may not be saved if you only have a setting of around 210 mb allocated for all files stored in the TIF folder. Alternatively, a lack of space will make some of the tutorials files disappear to make room for the .flv file.

Where to Locate Camtasia Videos just downloaded in IE browser:

While a Camtasia Video tutorial is playing in an IE browser window, all the files that make up the tutorial are downloaded at the same time to the Temporary Internet Files or “TIF” folder.

As you cleaned out your TIF folder prior to starting to play the Camtasia tutorial, 99percent of the files now contained within the Temporary Internet Files folder will go towards completing the finished version of that Camtasia tutorial

1. In the “General” section of your Internet Options pop up box, click on the “Settings” tab in the “Browsing history” section as follows:

2. As shown below, select the “View files” tab of the “Temporary Internet Files” pop up box to see all the related files that have been “temporarily” downloaded as your Camtasia Video is playing:

How to find the crucial .flv File from Temp Internet Files to save your Camtasia Video:

We know that a bunch of files make up any one Camtasia Studio video tutorial, and all of these files are downloaded to your IE Temporary Internet Files folder as the tutorial is playing in your IE browser .

The majority of these files will appear immediately in the “Temporary Internet Files” folder and usually end with “config.xml”, “preload.swf”, “controller.swf” and “.js” extensions. See this example from an Affiliate Radar tutorial I recently watched (FYI - the “ig” text file does not belong to the tutorial):

IMPORTANT: The all important “.flv” extension file (the only file you require to actually Save the tutorial to your computer), will not appear in the Temporary Internet Files until the Camtasia tutorial has played to about one third or one half of the video. The appearance of the .flv file depends on the speed of your Internet connection.

As an example with an ADSL2 internet connection, a 100 mb Camtasia video will have to play about quarter way through in my IE browser before the required “.flv” file will appear with the rest of the files in the desktop TIF folder. Simply, refresh your TIF folder after this time, and the .flv file should be there.

If not, please be patient, as it will appear when you refresh the TIF folder a little later down the track. Here it is — (All the other files associated with the tutorial have been removed by me, in the image below, so you might easily identify the all important .flv extension):

Now right click on the appropriate “.flv” file in your Temporary Internet Files folder and select the “open in a new window” tab (selecting the “open” tab option, will not work) and after a minute or so the familiar grey “file download” box will appear.

Select “Save” in the file download box, and in a minute or two, the .flv file will be permanently saved/stored to your desktop - and - into a folder of your choosing.

Enjoy the tutorial by viewing the .flv or flash tutorial, in the Sothink Flash Player, or whatever Flash Player you usually use.

It’s a cinch to then burn a bunch of such tutorials to a single DVD disc using a program like ConvertXtoDVD, so they may be played on any modern DVD player.   Rather than cramping up at a desktop computer or awkwardly balancing a laptop… isn’t it bliss to sit back in comfort and view the downloaded  Camtasia Studio video tutorials on a big screen TV?

What do you think? Do you have a faster way to save multimedia files using the IE browser?