Review: Among Demoware tools, Camtasia Studio is the most compelling video taker tool
Feature: Camtasia combines familiar and easy to use development with great output options In our review of Demoware trends and associated tools, one tool, Adobe's Captivate at $599, stands out as having the widest range of features. But Techsmith's Camtasia Studio 4 earns praise for making some demos easier to do , with more direct output options and at a lower price $299. So this review will highlight the difference between the demoware features leader, Adobe Captivate, and Techsmith's Camtasia Studio 4.
Adobe captivate does both event capture and video capture in the same session. that is one of its competitive advantages - it can deliver highest fidelity when required and then speed along with event capture when no external events are occurring. In contrast, Camtasia is a video taker or capture tool. This means that its filesizes will generally be bigger than for event capture demoware like MadCap Mimic or Qarbon Viewlet Builder or Captivate. Also, it generally will take longer to fully finish a Camtasia demo because it does not get the benefit of auto inserted captions or highlights as provided by Captivate, MadCap Mimic and the smart event capture demoware tools.
But Camtasia has its advantages too. Since it always does video captures there is no worry about missing an important GUI operation during a demo. In event capture tools like Captivate and MadCap users have to manually click frames to get snapshots of external event not associated with mouse clicks/movement or keyboard typing. Camtasia can decrease edit time by eliminating all flubs when key screen changes were not clicked and had to be re-recorded and spliced in. Also a video take is easier to narrate then a event capture demo because one is not distracted by required extra capture clicks.

Another compelling advantage of the video capture, is that IDE layout for editing can follow the familiar video editor pattern (see our reviews of video tools and the screenshot above): Major icons and commands on a strip across the top, a timeline strip along the bottom with its own strip of command icons. And in between, a left hand panel of logic workflow tasks to do(collapsible at the major tasks in the case of Camtasia), a middle properties or resources panel and a right hand panel with the movie/video preview screen. Popular video tools Adobe Premier Pro, Sony Vegas, and Ulead Video Studio all follow this video editing layout. So Camtasia editing will be familiar to any video savvy user.

However, camtasia adds to the appeal by having some of the best active help support for all its capture, edit, and publishing operations. Notice in the screenshot below all the help available to add a transition:

First at the top of the embedded Transitions panel there is a quick explanation of what to do. Next the Assist button will take users to the exact page in the Help system where Transitions are explained. The Show Me button will show a Camtasia demo video on how to do Transitions. One drawback, the video is online and not included in the install. Also note that the timeline has been automatically switched to the Storyboard view. There is also a Storyboard Help icon and when you click the Finished button, the standard edit screen will be restored.

It is this constant directed help that make it hard to go astray in Camtasia Studio - and not just in editing but also for every step in the workflow from capture through editing to publishing. Captivate has similar tutorials and lots of help; but not so directly such that you simply will not get lost in Camtasia.

Publishing Range

As noted above its hard to get lost in Camtasia. here in the Publish Wizard, Camtasia starts with the file formats for the video demo. Note that Camtasia validates the Flash advantage - that is Techsmith's recommended format - even over their own Techsmith video codec. But if you want more detail just click on the Help me choose a file format link and Camtasia's help will provide detailed reasoning behind each file format - and when to choose each.

Note the broad array of choices including iPod/iTunes format. So users can easily publish to several platforms. Camtasia has a batch creation process for just such requirements.

I did not do extensive testing of the different speed of renderings by the different systems. Also the size of the different files produced were not checked. That will be part of a third review on the various demoware products if there is sufficient interest in these reviews.

However, I can say that Camtasia was very fast in rendering our standard test demo, a 1 1/2 minute take of the Microsoft Hearts game. In less than 5 seconds, Camtasia Studio produced a 805MB .swf file with the associated HTML and JavaScript support files. Like all of the other tools the quality of the demo images was very good; however I liked the demo video control a bit better in captivate over Camtasia. Like Captivate, Camtasia offered three Flash Player options Players 6,7,and 8.

However, Camtasia does the same for every file format, offering users a number of specialized publishing options through the wizard. For example, with Windows metafile format there are twelve different settings of audio and WMV compression settings. In addition there were meta info properties, several file optimizations (dropping fades for more compressed files, etc), indexing and markers, plus AICC and SCORM settings for quizzes and surveys. In sum, Camtasia has one of the widest range and most complete set of publishing options among the demoware tools.

Summary

Although Camtasia does not have all the bells and especially programmatic whistles and can't produce the ultra small demo files that come with event capture demoware like Captivate, it has a lot going for it. It is hard to muff the video capture step with all the controls and the simple fact that it is a video take. Second, the familiar video edit layout coupled with Techsmith's general policy of guided help make working with the program the first and ninetieth time very easy. And Camtasia is versatile - see the image slideshow produced with Camtasia here. Users can also produce quizzes and surveys and pass the data to LMS with SCORM APIs. And finally, the $299US price is also very easy to take. So if fidelity of screen action and ease of finishing are your priorities in demoware, Camtasia Studio 4 is a bargain.

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