Camtasia

Back from a week in Spain (weather was lovely, as was the cerveza and tapas!) I’ve taken some time to look into some suggestions for screen recording.

Part of the developer community website we have was always aimed at providing online video tutorials showing the latest features. However we’ve had acres of issues getting these produced. The recording usually goes ok but editing them and getting them into a format that is acceptable for the website seemed to be causing us problem after problem.

Having checked out all three suggestions, Wink, Demobuilder and Camtasia Studio I have to admit (and you’ve probably already guessed from the title of this post) that Camtasia Studio blew me away. It’s a very slick piece of software, brilliantly designed to lead you further into the complexities it CAN offer without dazzling you with options the frist time you fire it up.

One of the best features, the one that took me by surprise, is called SmartFocus. As you click around the screen it zooms in appropriately and only, rarely, missed a beat in the few demo recordings I took. It’s very impressive, and once you get into editing the recordings, splitting them up, adding transitions, captions, callouts… well I’m sold. As will my company very soon (the purchased order has been raised).

Thanks to all for their suggestions.

If you are looking for a very simple and quick way of recording a screen demonstration (I’ve run up to about 30 minutes without issue) then go download the Camtasia Studio demo copy. You can try it for 30 days and if you are in the market for software like this then definitely give it a look.

Hell, if you have 30 minutes free, download it, install it, record something and watch the playback. You’ll probably start to wonder what you COULD use it for in the future…

Note: I’m not being paid for this, just the opinion of a very impressed first time user.

Comments

  1. Hello,

    I tried creating flash demos using Camtasia, but found that the output “swf” file size is HUGE. I think Adobe Captivate is a much better option (if you are planning to add demos on your website).

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