How to: avoid recording time limits with the Camera app

While many of the videos you may record under your document camera will be brief, there may be some times that you want to create a longer video. Unfortunately, the stock software we have available to us (Sphere) caps your recording time somewhere around fifteen minutes.

What are you to do?

Luckily, Windows 10 has a nifty, built-in camera app that can help you through this problem.

RECORD VIDEO WITH THE CAMERA APP

First, find the Camera app:

open up the Start menu
Scroll through your list of apps (they're listed alphabetically) until you find the one called Camera, and click it.

Quick tip: you can make it even easier to find by right-clicking on it, selecting More, and then Pin to taskbar. That way, it always lives on the taskbar at the bottom of your desktop.

Once the Camera app is open, and your document camera is turned on, it's time to record some video.

It's as easy as two clicks:

1. First, change the mode of the app from photo to video.

2. Press the big grey button to get started!

3. Press the big red button to stop.

Any videos you record are saved into your Pictures folder in the Camera Roll. You can find it by double-clicking on This PC.

Tip: a best practice would be to upload these video files to Google Drive or YouTube for safe keeping. That way, you'll always have access to them on the web.

Video settings

There are some important settings to consider when making a video.

First, think about what you will do with your video after you're done recording it. If you plan to upload it to Edpuzzle or YouTube, it may be best to keep your file-size small (Edpuzzle has an upload limit of 1 GB per file, for example).

This can be done in two ways:

keep your video short
change video quality settings in the Camera app

Since you are a person who wants to create epic videos, we'll focus on changing video quality settings:

First, click on the little gear icon in the upper right corner of the Camera app window

Next, under the Videos section, select a more reasonable Video recording quality setting. I'd recommend 1280x720p/20 fps. This is still very high quality video (HD even), but will reduce the file size from a long video. If you try it out and you don't think the quality is good enough, bump it up to 1280x720p/30 fps.

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