Camtasia

[ptop]

I don't know if this is going to one of my many stupid question on this forum but here we go Does or has anyone ever considered using Camtasia to record your trading day and or just your trades so you can go back on them and see what you were thinking and also seeing how to improve upon your trading, or see what you might have missed in a losing trade set up? I got this idea in my funny little brain while watching some of soultraders vids using Camtasia and noticed how small the file sizes are.

Any thoughts?

Cheers

[brownsfan019]

ptop - it's a good idea, give it a whirl and see how you like it. It's a great way to see and hear your trading day. Couple that with your SnagIt chart annotations and that's a good digital journal in my opinion.

[Dogpile]

I have a camcorder and recorded the opening 2 hours for a few weeks. Was very cool to watch your day in review and see your indicators telling you what to do --- since you know what will happen next, you can watch the action and see all the things showing you the way that you probably missed the first time around. was very educational. Was also crazy to hear my breathing patterns change when in a position -- had no idea... Come to think of it, I should start doing this again - this was a very useful exercise.

[Z_trade]

Camtasia studio is an excellent tool to record any activities on the screen, especially using tape reading technique. However you need to be careful while real time trading because Camtasia is very source hungry software. Depends on the size of the window, number of frames per second and memory installed it will dramatically slow your computer performance over time and even freeze after couple hours. Several ways to avoid it – run on the powerful server or just cut recording every hour or so and restart new file.

[sunt]

Camtasia is excellent for making educational presentations, and for many other specific uses involving a clean recording of screen activity. However, you are definitely impacting your CPU, and this is quite possibly not desirable on your trading computer.

I second the comment above about using a video cam. I advocate putting your video cam on a tripod, setting the placement and zoom so that the screen will be clearly visible, and letting it run all during your live trading.

There are multiple benefits of this, including documenting data lag, software glitches, brokerage errors, and most of all, documenting your own performance. If you talk as you act to provide a running commentary of your actions you will learn alot about your own behavior, and retrospective analysis while offline can help you determine areas for improvement.

[actaus]

I am using camtasia studio to record whole screen of 3360x1050 (dual 22" LCD). Unchecking "Auto configure" at Tools->Options->Steams->Screen video options and setting "capture frame rate" 3 fames/sec will help to reduce resource usage.
Without it, most of CPU time will be used up by camtasia studo.
Good graphic card is also necessary to reduce CPU usage.

I used, Intel Duo 6600(2.4Ghz) CPU, 2GB RAM, ASUS EN7900GS TOP graphic card. Recording consumed less than 20% of CPU.

[ptop]

Thanks actaus, I have the 4.2 version and I believe for me it is in tools option video, What codec are you using to compress vids to?

As for hardware I have p 4 3.0 1 gig ram and ati X800 GTO vid card, we shall see if this is good enough.

Cheers

[actaus]

"TechSmith Screen Capture Codec" is the best, I think, since it is lossless compression and replay quality is the same as it is recorded.
Cons: the file size is a bit large, but Harddisk is also very cheap nowadays.