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Camtasia Gets Better Captioning Support

Simon Mackie — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 16:00:51 +0000

Techsmith’s popular screencast recording and editing tool, Camtasia, has just been updated; it now includes much better captioning support. Both Camtasia Studio 7.1 (the Windows version of the app) and Camtasia for Mac 1.2 offer new and improved captioning tools, including:

Simplified captioning support
Multiple language support
Importing/export of captions, including support for common caption file formats (SRT and SAMI), and sync with video
Ability to search the content within the videos you create
Screencast.com (Techsmith’s screencast video hosting site) now has support for closed captions, caption-based video search, and HTML5-enabled mobile device playback.

Additionally, Camtasia Studio gets automated speech-to-text transcription tools (based on Windows Speech Recognition) for generating captions.

Captioning is important in order to create screencasts that are accessible for the deaf, and is therefore vital for organizations that are required by legislation (or will be) to create web content that is accessible. It’s also useful if the presenter’s speech isn’t crystal clear, and is appreciated by viewers who don’t want to have to have the volume turned up to be able to understand a screencast. Additionally, captioning screencast content makes it searchable, so viewers can jump to the sections that they’re interested in, which is especially useful for longer videos.

As well as the improved captioning support, Camtasia also gets some other useful updates, including iPad-optimized video output, 64-bit codec support and integration with Camtasia Relay, a distance learning tool.

What tools do you use for captioning your videos?

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Camtasia for Mac: A Full-featured Screencasting Solution

Simon Mackie — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 22:00:14 +0000

Most of WebWorkerDaily’s screencasts are recorded using Techsmith’s Jing Pro screen-recording software, an easy-to-use, low-cost solution that we’ve also written about. Techsmith recently released new versions of Camtasia, its more full-featured screencast recording and editing suite for PCs and Macs. I was fortunate enough to be offered the chance to try out Camtasia for Mac 1.1, so I’ve been putting it through its paces over the past couple of days.

Like Jing, Camtasia is a tool for recording your screen (or just a portion of it) together with a voiceover, and optionally, input from a camera, such as a webcam. That’s where the similarities end, though — with Camtasia, once you’ve finished recording, you’re taken to an editing suite where you can turn your recording into a polished movie. Add transitions and fades to your recording, splice in additional video, record a new voiceover, overlay text, edit the audio — there are plenty of robust tools available for creating a truly professional-looking piece. There are some really useful “smart” features available, too. Perhaps most useful is the SmartFocus, which automatically zooms into the portion of the screen where the action is taking pace (perhaps you’re clicking a button, or filling out a form). Adding effects and transitions to the movie is a simple matter of dragging and dropping them onto the timeline. You can also overlay text and shapes, and reposition elements like the webcam shot, just by dragging them on the canvas.

Editing in Camtasia is fairly straightforward, although if you haven’t done any video editing before if may take a little getting used to. However, I think that if you’re doing any kind of serious screencasting work, it’s worth spending the time getting the hang of it. With Jing, if I make a mistake during recording or if there is something in the final version that I’m not completely happy with, I have to re-record the entire thing, while in Camtasia, I can fix little mistakes and just generally produce a much more polished end product with a little editing.

I made a short screencast in Camtasia to show you around the editing suite:

One additional significant difference between Jing and Camtasia is, of course, the cost. While Jing is free (the Pro version that I use costs $15 per year), Camtasia for Mac is currently on sale for $99 (it normally costs $149). A 30-day free trial is available, which I would recommend taking advantage of to see if the editing facilities available are worth the additional cost for you.

Let us know what you think of Camtasia for Mac in the comments.

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Camtasia vs. ScreenFlow: Creating Your First Screencast

Matthew Bookspan — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:00:40 +0000

If you have need to visually demonstrate your product, and you have the resources, then it just makes sense to produce a screencast. With the release of ScreenFlow 2.0, I thought it’d be useful to perform a real-world comparison review of the screencast heavyweight champ versus the relative newcomer (at least to the Mac), Camtasia.

Getting Started

I started this comparison by creating the same video in both Camtasia and ScreenFlow. Both applications are very straightforward to setup and get going in creating the screencast. Camtasia gets a little bit of an edge for configuration because, unlike ScreenFlow, you do not have to install a separate audio driver.

However, once you get started recording, both applications provide you with a simple countdown prior to recording. As a primer, try to write your script prior to recording. This way, you will have a consistent experience for your customer once you complete production.

Please note, I did not try to record a screencast across multiple displays or using an external microphone. I used what most of us have — a MacBook (or a desktop) and the built-in microphone.

Basic Editing

After I recorded the basic screencast, I was presented with the Editor window within each program:

Screenflow Main Window

Camtasia Main Window

Both programs have very similar editing experiences using a timeline. ScreenFlow has the added advantage of separating out the audio from the video portions of the recording. This is a great experience, because you can also add another voiceover quite easily. In contrast, Camtasia merges the audio and video. It wasn’t easily discoverable how to add or change the existing audio recording. With my limited skills, being able to re-record the audio as a separate track was very handy.

Enhancing Your Screencast Recording

Each has a plethora of features to modify your recording.

Cropping: Remove extra portions of the video that you don’t need.
Trimming: Remove any extra (or bad) audio/video from the timeline.
Playback tools: Play, reverse, fast-forward.
Import Media: Additional audio, video or images.
And a whole lot more…

What’s nice is that as you begin to explore more in ScreenFlow and Camtasia, they both provide simple video tutorials to show you how to use the features. For someone new to creating screencasts, this is very helpful.

Here are a few glimpses of the app once I inserted some text, graphics and transitions.

ScreenFlow: with additional text box and transitions

Camtasia: with additional graphics, text and transitions

I did perform a little trimming (Camtasia calls this Delete or Ripple Delete) at the end of each video so that you can’t see me click/end the recordings (there is no way to avoid this, although it would be nice if both tools had this as an option). Both tools make this really easy to do.

Both applications have advanced audio capabilities. ScreenFlow has true audio ducking, or the ability to decrease the volume of one recording while another audio volume is increased. Camtasia offers audio transition effects, which offers some flexibility, but not anywhere near as rich as ScreenFlow.

Unfortunately, neither application has great iLife integration, so I can’t directly insert audio clips from GarageBand. I think this is a missed opportunity for both Camtasia and ScreenFlow.

The Victor

This is a tough call. However, I give the slight edge to ScreenFlow because of its ability to edit audio separately as well as its UI for editing different properties of a recording. I happen to prefer the overall Camtasia UI over ScreenFlow’s as it seems more like iMovie ’09 to me.

Ultimately, you have to decide which items are more important to you:

Features/Functionality
User Experience
Price

ScreenFlow 2.0 is priced at $99 (or $29 for an upgrade). Similarly, Camtasia 1.0.1 is currently priced at $99 (this is a promotional price, the web site shows the full retail for $149).

If you have limited funds, there is the screen recording capability in QuickTime X, a component of Snow Leopard. If you’ve already upgraded to Snow Leopard, then you have this option available. Otherwise, the Snow Leopard upgrade is $29. Please note that QuickTime X is nowhere in the same league as ScreenFlow or Camtasia. However, if you have a new Mac that includes Snow Leopard and iLife ’09 (which includes iMovie ’09), you can make some very simple Screencasts, excluding the fancier features available from either ScreenFlow or Camtasia.

The Videos

Don’t laugh, they’re horrible.

Camtasia

ScreenFlow

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Jing Capture Software Goes Pro

Scott Blitstein — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:13:29 +0000

I’ve been a big fan of Jing capture software for a while now. I use it for all of my screen shots here for WWD, and have also used it to create some short demo screencasts. It works really well for me, and is a great free option for my needs.

Today the folks at TechSmith announced the availability of a Pro version with features aimed at the video capture crowd. For a paltry $14.95 year they have beefed up the service to allow higher quality HD videos, enhanced integration with video sharing sites including a direct upload to YouTube, and removal of any Jing branding.

With the ability to capture H.264/MPEG-4 AVC in addition to the SWF files of the free version, Jing becomes a more flexible option for your video capture needs.

If you’re doing heavy duty video capture, you’ll probably want to consider an upgrade to Camtasia or similar, but for an easy to use screen capture / screen cast solution Jing is a great choice.

Jing is available for both PC and Mac, and is now available in both a free and pro version.

What do you use for screen capture?

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