Unlike the Flash-only Captivate, Camtasia supports everything from animated GIF and RealMovie to high-quality AVI, MOV and Silverlight-compatible WMV. Crucially, the wizard offers a preview to see and compare video quality before committing yourself. The Production wizard provides quick access to four main destination presets – Web, CD, Blog and iPod – or you can set custom parameters. The end results aren’t just physically clearer, the pans and zooms are also an excellent way of making your demos more engaging and intelligible. With Camtasia 5, when you change a project’s dimensions, it gives you the option of applying its innovative SmartFocus technology: this intelligently resizes your recording around the points of screen activity, panning and zooming.Įven better, it adds zoom points to your timeline and, by double-clicking on these, you can manually control the position, size and duration of your pans and zooms. Often, you’ll record at one screen size, but then want to output at smaller dimensions previously, the downsampling produced blurry results in which the action took place in a small part of the smaller screen. However, if you just want to produce simple software demos, Camtasia 5 has a major ace up its sleeve. And if you plan to extend into assessment and eLearning, Camtasia’s crude multiple-choice and fill-the-blank questions look pretty pathetic compared with the rich interactivity of Captivate. With features such as automatic highlight and captioning as you record, plus its slide- and overlay-based approach to editing, Captivate moves far beyond basic screen recording. The Studio module is also the place for adding title sequences, callouts, transitions, new audio and video (for picture-in-picture effects), and even Flash quizzes and surveys.īut for all that, Camtasia Studio can’t match Captivate’s polish. Since Camtasia Studio 5’s projects are now edited at 30fps, handling is more precise and the results smoother. Here, you can split clips, add in and out points, extend frames and change the playback speed. Your various clips, images and audio files are ordered by dragging them onto the timeline. Once you’ve finished recording and saved your file to TechSmith’s lossless CAMREC format, you can load it into the main Studio module for editing and enhancing. Setting up the screen area to record is also simpler: elements such as windows and dialogs are automatically highlighted as you mouse over them, or you can just drag to mark out a freeform area.

It’s been completely reworked: you’re now presented with a simple graphical dialog with just three options for audio, video and screen capture. TechSmith is otherwise best known for its screen-capture utility, SnagIt, and it’s no coincidence that screen capture is central to Camtasia Studio, too.

What is camtasia studio