TechSmith will announce a new version of Camtasia Studio 5 screen recording software tomorrow. For readers who have not heard of Camtasia Studio before, it is “the” software for creating full-motion movies of all your desktop activity (also known as screencasting).
If you are an old Camtasia Studio user, you will barely notice any difference in the interface of Camtasia Studio 5 when compared with the previous version but once you explore deeper, version 5 will certainly leave you feeling impressing and more productive.
The first step in creating any screencast video is about picking the desktop area that you want to record and the new Camtasia Recorder makes selecting the recording area extremely easy. As you hover the mouse over the screen, Camtasia makes intelligent and dynamic suggestions by interpreting the nearest rectangular zone.
Like Microsoft Office documents, Camtasia editor will auto-save your sessions every few minutes to help you recover work in the event of a crash. You now also have the option to restore cursor position when you resume a screen recording after pausing for some time.
This is so useful as jerky mouse movements can make your screencasts look less professional. With Camtasia now remembering the exact location (and state) of mouse cursor when you hit pause, the guess work is no longer required.
The new Camtasia Studio 5 can produce your computer screen videos in most popular media formats including iPod, Flash movies, QuickTime and Windows Media for sharing on YouTube. This feature was available in version 4 as well but the new video encoding process looks a bit faster and the wizard is definitely more intuitive.
They have added some new video transitions including the famous “Cube Rotate” that you Mac users may have seen in applications like KeyNote, Final Cut Pro or Snapz Pro.
CS 5 includes a new Flash Player skin (called ExpressShow) that allows viewers to show/hide text captions, see table of contents, watch videos in full screen mode and even replay the video similar to YouTube.
With Camtasia Studio 5, you can record either full motion video or even single frames much like Qarbon ViewletBuilder. Press the recording hotkey (F9) each time you want a snapshot of the current screen in the final movie much like clicking the shutter of a camera. When you are done, click F10 and all those still screen capture images will be converted into a movie (remember stop animations).
Similarly, there’s a time lapse capture mode that lets you capture video at a normal pace but it will playback at different frame rate (either slow or fast) - can be useful for capturing software that take long processing time. For instance, if you are on a dialup connection and recording your web browser session, this mode may help.
Finally, let me share a feature that alone makes Camtasia Studio 5 a worthwhile upgrade - it’s called Smart Focus. You can record any video in full screen mode and Camtasia will automatically add the zoom and panning keyframes so that your video looks crystal clear on any screen be it the 2.5″ iPod or your 400 pixel wide blog or the 320×240 YouTube player. You just record the video once and Camtasia 5 will produce it in multiple formats and dimensions automatically.
I haven’t come across such a feature in any of the other Camtasia rivals like Adobe Captivate.
Camtasia Studio 5 works on XP and Vista though I believe that a Mac version is in the works. The software isn’t cheap at $299 but if want a screencasting tool that’s versatile, extremely easy to use and offers peace of mind, Camtasia Studio 5 is the only way to go. It will also lets you live record your PowerPoint Presentations and lectures into video files that you can later upload to YouTube. Highly recommended.
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/software/download/camtasia-studio-5-screencasting-desktop-videos/1475/
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
i want to ask, is there a version of camtasia for Linux? If there isn’t, could you review some softwares to do screencast for Linux.
Written by Linux newbie on 10.10.07
so far I am using Mercury Screen Recorder, which is addin of Mercury (HP)Quality centre.. But we can’t use MSR recorder alone..we must have Quality centre to store the files n to launch.. But seems this tool is the best one….anyways i need to put my hands on this….
Written by Sai Konduru on 10.10.07
CAM STUDIO
Free Screen Recording Software !! link
Its Open Source ..
i was just thinking about compressing these video files .. especially lynda.com and vtc they have damn low sizes but great quality i think thats only possible with quicktime ..codecs
Written by Priyankeshu on 10.15.07
How can I get a free registered copy of Camstudio?
Written by Lannie Walker on 11.26.07
I have a website that is 100″ long and 12″ wide. i’d like to make a video of me clicking around on the various links and then using the back key to get back and then make an avi or mpg file of the whole operation.
As far as I can tell most of the screen cap programs only do the current screen and don’t let you scroll. I’m looking at superscreen capture but dont yet know what it does.
Camtasia is FAR out of my budget - I need this for about $40.00 max. Can anyone tell me what (if anything) would work to do what I need.
Written by John Hansen on 08.02.08
Things about Camtasia Studio 5.0 that you should be aware of:
1. The audio editor is horrible and frequently shuts down in the middle of editing causing you to lose all your edits. This was not isolated to a single computer. I had several contacts with support and they all told me that they recommend downloading another audio editor.
2. The pause feature would be cool except that you have to really plan for when you will use it. If you pause during a recording, you naturally have to return to the main application so that you can start up the audio again. However, if you are not slow enough, when you start the audio, go to the site that you are video capturing and then un-pause, Camtasia will sometimes automatically return to the Studio window and put your website into the background. There have been several times when this has happened and negated the entire video capture. I have wasted hours in re-working because of this bug.
In the course of the past year, I have had altogether too many frustrating moments because the application has bugged out and caused me to re-do work multiple times. The real kicker is that there is nothing comparable that you can opt to use instead. I have found this little fact to be disappointing because I would gladly unload this application if I could.
Written by JCS on 09.18.08