Recording with Audio / Publishing to Video

This article is a companion to the video of the same name, available on the YouTube channel.

I wanted to provide a short video on how to recreate one of the ‘new-style’ Manager reports in Power BI – because although it’s not difficult, it is entirely unintuitive. But rather than using Camtasia to capture a video of me demonstrating the functionality, I thought I’d do the whole thing entirely in SAP Enable Now, through a couple of other SAP Enable Now features: The ability to capture audio during recording, and the ability to publish to video. This post explains the steps I followed, and a few things to watch out for if you do the same.

Capturing audio during simulation recording

First, you can capture audio during the recording of a simulation, fairly easy in SAP Enable Now. I personally do not tend to use this method as I find it distracting to have to worry about my words as I’m capturing my actions in the system, and I find the quality is not quite as good as if I use Audacity with its many filters an effects.

To capture audio, the simulation needs to be an audio project. To do this, open the (new/empty) simulation project in the Project Editor, and then select menu option Project > Convert to Audio Project. This will add the relevant properties to allow audio to be captured (these properties are not available by default as they take up space, so you don’t want to include them in every simulation if you don’t use (or rarely use audio). It will also result in the Audio Editor panel being displayed in the Editor, as shown below:

If the Audio Editor isn’t automatically displayed for an Audit Project you can display it by selecting menu option View > Components > Audio Editor.

Next, when you record the simulation, you need to indicate that you want audio to be captured as well:

Then, when you record, simply talk as you carry out the steps in the application, and this audio will be captured as part of the simulation (obviously, assuming you have a working microphone). There’s a few things to watch out for, though.

Firstly, audio is captured per Step (as you’d expect), and it is captured when you perform the action. That is, when you perform the action, all audio not yet saved will be saved against the step that action is captured for. At the exact time you perform the action. So you need to bee careful that you are not talking when you perform the action, or your audio could be split across Steps.

Secondly, this is real-time audio capture; It will start being captured when you click record, and everything will be captured until you stop. This means that you need to be careful about stopping to gather your thoughts, or decide what to do next – that will result in long periods of silence being captured that you’ll then have to edit out.

Editing the recording

Once you have finished recording, you can edit it as usual, but you’ll also need to take care to edit the audio. To be fair, SAP Enable Now does provide a reasonable amount of audio editing features, but most of the time you’ll just need to use the Cut feature to cut out any silence. The other feature that is useful is Normalize All Audio Files, which is located on the Audio menu. This will set all audio across the entire simulation to have a consistent (and recommended) volume. But even with this, the audio levels can vary depending on how consistent you are in your proximity to the microphone.

The main problem I had was that SAP Enable Now kept crashing on me when I tried to edit the audio – and inconsistently so. Sometimes it would let me edit a few steps and then crash; sometimes it would just freeze-and-crash immediately. I don’t know if that is something unique to my PC/set-up (I don’t tend to use SAP Enable Now’s Audio Editor at all) but it was bad enough that I gave up and went back to using Audacity (which I had to do in the file system, because SAP Enable Now does not let you choose the Audio Editor (like you can choose the Image Editor) – although there is a customer improvement request asking for this.

You’ll also need to decide whether you have the Bubble Text matching the audio, or not. I chose to keep things simple, and not have them match exactly. My resulting recording is fairly simple, and if I was to use it for other purposes (in Demo Mode and/or Practice Mode) I would perform more editing, but for the purposes of this demonstration, I kept it simple and performed minimal edits.

One final caution: Audio is defined at the Step level. If you have multiple action/explanation macros in the Step, the audio will be played against the first macro in the Step, and playback will only advance to the next macro in the Step once the audio has finished. Therefore, you do not want to merge steps, or otherwise deviate from a strict “one macro per Step” (discounting the Screen macro) rule for audio projects.

Generating the video

Generating video is very simple, and can be done within the Project Editor for a single simulation, or from the Workarea, for a single simulation or an entire Group. just select menu option Tools > Generate Video, and you’ll see the following dialog box:

You can choose the size and format via the Presents button, and/or tweak these settings via the Options button. Generally, you can leave the defaults, which is what I did here. Just click Generate Video and it will run through the simulation, generating the video.

Effectively, SAP Enable Now just plays the simulation back in Demo Mode (which is the only mode audio plays in), recording the screen and system audio as it does so. This will take as long as playback of the simulation (in Demo Mode) takes, and my advice is to not use your PC for anything else in the meantime, in case this generates resource contention or otherwise interferes with the capture.

If you have specified Display Durations for your macros, these will be ignored, and each macro will be displayed for the duration of the associated audio. If you have any macros that have a Display Duration of -1 (“forever”), this will be ignored, and the macro bubble will be displayed for whatever period is defined in your Playback Settings > General > Video settings.

People often ask me if it is possible to generate the video without the Bubbles. In short, no. It’s just a recording of Demo Mode playback, so you will get exactly what Demo Mode shows. That said, technically you can, by deselecting the Simulation >Bubble in Demo Mode property for every Bubble in the simulation (and probably for every Highlight in Demo Mode property as well).

Finally, when the video generation is complete, you’ll have the option to play it or open the folder it has been saved to. The video is actually saved as an asset of the simulation project, within SAP Enable Now. If you want to provide this to someone who does not have an SAP Enable Now license, you will need to copy it from the folder, and save it somewhere outside of SAP Enable Now – such as a LAN share, or internal video library. No license is required to consume a .MP4 file from outside of SAP Enable Now.

Summary

Overall, would I choose to use this method for capturing videos in future? No, probably not. I prefer Camtasia as that gives me a lot more control over the finished video. However, if you just need to create simple demonstration videos (or you don’t have a Camtasia license), sure, it’s effective functionality. And if you already have the simulation recorded for other purposes, it’s a relatively effortless activity to generate a stand-alone video from this (although I’d argue that providing them with a link to Demo Mode is a much better solution).