If you already record videos or have thought about starting, you must have heard about camtasia studio. It’s the IBM of the video recording world. The ‘all singing, all dancing’ application but with a hefty price tag of $299. Although it’s been around for quite some time, the publisher, techsmith have constantly improved and added new features. But is it worth the price tag?
If you want to look like a video professional, then you really should buy camtasia. It can record, edit and publish your video masterpiece using a complete suite of tools and features. The best way to get a feel for what’s under the hood is to watch the overview video and then take the product tour. Camtasia version 6 is now available with new features, like the zoom feature, which is called ‘smartfocus’. It’s a great addition. It zooms in automatically to where your cursor is on the screen.
It creates high quality results and can publish to the new high definition standard used by youtube. It can also embed a webcam of you talking. The editing capabilities are generous. It can mix multiple tracks together. So, if you record the voice and then the screen shots separately (the professional way), they can be mixed together. Separating voice and video makes it much easier to get excellent results, and the voice recording can be done with audacity, creating a podcast. You then have two products, which can be submitted to video and podcast directories.
The publishing options allow for all the variations you can think of including windows media, flash, AVI and youtube formats, different screen sizes and aspect ratios. You choose the area of the screen to record and lock the dimensions. A recording control panel appears just below the record area (not inside it like some recorders), which is very simple to use. You can integrate powerpoint slides and any other text as you wish.
All in all, I think it’s a great product and I have created a few videos using camtasia. It’s not for the faint hearted as it’s not easy to learn. But, I can recommend screencast profits by Lon Naylor. He tells you how to create professional looking, and sounding, videos using camtasia.
Camtasia is not the easy option, but it produces great videos.
