I've had the same problem...

for the mouse clicks I have made a conscience effort to click the mouse slow and quietly. I have also gone as far as editing out the clicks in camtasia.

for the fan you can try adding a soft audio track to your presentation, or try doing the recording when your cpu fan isn't running.

Hi Tom,

I use a different process which takes a little longer, but produces far better results. It's quite complicated, but I'll try and walk you through the most important pieces:

1) I write my script out in full (this is important for a later step) and print it.
2) I produce my PowerPoint to support the script, tweaking the script if necessary.
3) I record the voiceover in Audacity, then clean it up, including removing the noise of my PC fan and editing out any "um's" and "ah's".
4) I now go through my PowerPoint with the script in front of me, and I make a mark on the printout of the script at the precise points where I have to click the mouse.
5) I now record with Camtasia whilst playing the voiceover track and capturing the system audio and use the marks on my script to know when to click the mouse.

You can take this further to produce really high quality voiceovers, but this process should take you a good step forward. If you then layer background music, you'll find your videos sound amazing!

The alternative approach, which works best when you HAVE to record the audio live (i.e. when producing a demo or training video) is to export the audio track out to Audacity where you can still apply the same noise removal techniques if you need to, although I find people are more tolerant of background noise in this type of video.

Hope this helps!

Kind regards,
-John.

Search for a "lavalier mic" on Amazon. They have some OK ones for about $20, which should be fine for what you're trying to do.

Then you just simply plug this into your mic port and clip it onto your shirt. This takes the sound recording away from your computer and near your mouth where you want it! My guess is the difference in sound will blow you away.

When you start recording your presentation let the recording run for about 5-10 seconds before you start talking. This will give you a nice section of just background noise in your video - this is what we want.

Once you export the presentation to Camtasia for editing, highlight the small section at the beginning of your video that has no voice in it, just background noise. Once you have that section selected go to 'Audio Enhancements' and under the section titled 'Background Noise Removal' select the option that says 'Manually select a region of audio with noise but no voice narration'.

Once you have selected that option click on the 'Remove Noise' button. You will then hear that section of the track play. Once it has finished playing through that small section simply click on the 'Ok' button at the top.

That should get rid of most of your background noise. If you are having troubles with the mouse clicks then make sure you do a few of those same mouse clicks during that silent bit at the beginning of your video so they will get removed as background noise as well.

I do a lot of Powerpoint narrated videos and I find using the 'Spacebar' on my keyboard makes a lot less noise than pressing a mouse button to change the slides. Have a play around and see what works best for you.

The amount of background noise you pick up also has to do with the type and quality of microphone you are using and where you have that microphone located and pointed when you are doing the recording. You should run a little test video first and try some different microphone locations and see which ones ends up sounding the best for you.