Content area
Full text
TechSmith Camtasia 5
Camtasia 5 is a very strong release that's well worth the upgrade price, which should make the program even more attractive to those just starting to produce screencams. Overall, the release offers more streamlined workflow, with a single-screen Recorder that replaces the multistep wizard, and SmartFocus, which takes some of the work out of applying pans and zooms even if it's not perfect.
Price: $299 ($149 upgrade)
For more information:
www.techsmith.com
TechSmith Corp.'s Camtasia is one of my "go-to" tools that lives on almost every Windows-based computer in my office. I use it for a range of screencam projects, from informal "here's how you use the review feature in Microsoft Word" videos to send to authors I'm working with to polished screencams for clients, magazine websites, and my own DVD-based tutorials. So when new versions of Camtasia come out, I get pretty excited.
As it turns out, there's a lot to get excited about, but there are also some caveats. The new SmartFocus feature should help all producers, as will the lower profile but equally important Restore Cursor Location after Pause feature. I also like the new streamlined recorder window, though some of the related features didn't fully work for me. Throw in a new AutoSave feature and there's more than enough to justify the $149 upgrade price ($299 retail) and to keep Camtasia at the top of the heap for those capturing, editing, and producing screencam-based presentations on Windows.
Overview
For those new to the market, Camtasia is a full-featured screen capture and editing program with outstanding output capabilities (see Figure 1). The program can capture screens and voice, and it can also merge PowerPoint presentations with recorded narrations, so you can present live once and distribute a narrated PowerPoint presentation, complete with talking head overlay, if desired, from your website many times.
Most projects involve screen recording, with and without real-time narration, since you can easily add narration in Camtasia's editing application Camtasia Studio. Studio is like many timeline editors with tracks for different content. It can add callouts, transitions, captions, and even a picture-in-picture video to your presentation. Like Adobe's Captivate, Camtasia can produce quizzes and surveys, though Captivate is probably a better choice for all but the...