Reader Camtasia Studio Review
Camtasia Studio Review
Making and publishing screencasts has become much easier the last few years with the advent of programs such as Adobe Captivate, Wink and of course Camtasia. Gone are the days where screencasting applications only captured your screen movements, current screen capturing tools are far much more powerful and sophisticated.
This review gives my initial impressions after testing the software though at this point I must admit to being an Adobe Captivate user, so I’m a little bias.
What’s TechSmith About?
TechSmith aim to help teachers and educators produce interactive demonstrations and screencasts with their Camtasia family of software. The three software packages that make up the Camtasia family are called – Camtasia Studio (Windows), Camtasia for Mac and Camtasia Relay (server-based).
What’s New in Camtasia Studio 7.1?
Continuing with their sport new look from version 7.0, with Camtasia Studio 7.1 you get more than a simple screen recorder, you can now generate effective screencasts faster and easier and with more consistency.
- Enhanced Captioning Support, 508 compliant closed and open captions.
- Speech-to-Text Transcription. Using Windows Speech Recognition you can automatically turn your speech into captions!
- iPad Output. Viewers can now watch you presentations whilst on-the-go!
- Import/Export Captioning Files. You can now export your audio and get it transcribed into a caption file, then import the transcription back into your video.
If you’re a seasoned Camtasia user you may agree with me that the new look does take a little getting used to after the major interface change.
Camtasia Studio 7 and Above
Camtasia Library
The new Library feature let’s you store all of your video elements (music, custom callouts, sound effects, video backgrounds, etc.) in one place!
You now get once click access. Highlight content on the timeline, right-click and ADD to library. It’s now ready for future use with a simple drag-n-drop. You can also share libraries with others!
New Callouts
Camtasia 7 has some upgrades and additions to it’s Callouts. You still retain the legacy callouts but the new batch of shapes have a much nicer look. Effects such as transparency are much nicer, plus, you get much greater control over the new styles, especially how they look. A few new “specialty” Callouts are also available.
- Strangely, all of these assets are filled in shapes which prohibits you, for instance, from putting a circle around a screen button.
Cursor Effects
The new cursor effects are really good. In previous versions you could add a highlight or rings to your cursor. Now, as long as you save your recording as a CAMREC file, you can add or modify all those attention-drawing items at editing time.
Audio Enhancements
New to version 7 is the ability to get some nice control over fading in and fading out and volume levels for your audio track.
- The BAD news… the audio enhancements like noise removal and volume level still mess with EVERY AUDIO TRACK.
Resource Intensive, Hits the Processor Hard
Camtasia’s biggest stumbling block is during screen capture. The software is resource intensive and hits the processor hard. When using the software it’s best to have as few processes running as possible. If you don’t give the application enough CPU time your recording will be choppy and erratic. This problem will be particularly noticeable when capturing video.
Editing
Once your capture is complete, Camtasia opens its editing window automatically.
- Despite its strong Windows roots, Camtasia for Mac most certainly is a Macintosh application and the developer clearly is not trying to just throw an ill conceived port at Mac users.
Camtasia has several interesting editing functions. It supports built in transitions. This is an innovative feature that allows you to transition your shots right in the screencasting application. The transitions are limited but probably enough for most uses.
There is a way to color shade your screen but it seems to be an all or nothing proposition and I’m not sure how useful that is for producing screencasts.
Is Camtasia Studio 7 Worth the Upgrade?
The UI is generally clean and self explanatory. You could get this application running with little training but Camtasia’s excellent online tutorials are worth the time.
When you look at the performance improvements, new features and gadgets I think an upgrade from earlier versions is a reasonable consideration. The downside is the learning curve for the new interface. This of course is not a consideration for new users.
You can download a 30-Day Free Trial of Camtasia Studio from TechSmith once you’ve finished reading and evaluate the software yourself. Do let me have your opinion by entering your views at the end of this page. See you soon.
Just doesn’t work with standard Windows 7. I have a brand new, standard Toshiba laptop (Amazon’s most popular) with an i7 CPU and 6GB of memory. I put standard MOV files into Camtasia for video editing. It gets part way into production, then dies with a generic error.
Camtasia 6 never worked properly with two separate, standard HP machines that I had, both of which comfortably exceeded their minimum requirements.
Looked good but couldn’t try out due to error!
Looks like a well put together program, but as soon as I installed on Win XP I keep getting this error every 30 seconds or so. “Media Center Receiver Service has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.”