Review: Camtasia Studio

Camtasia Studio is a suite of five programs designed to help you build interactive presentations from recorded video of screen activity. There are five tools in the suite: Camtasia Recorder, Producer, Effects, MenuMaker and Player.

What is it? A video screen capture and presentation suite.
Manufacturer: TechSmith
Platforms: Win (NT4, 98, 2000, ME, XP)

Installation is simple but configurable and was more or less painless on Windows XP. The interface is also pretty easy to get used to as the most common functionality is repeated across icons, menus and hotkeys. For example, to begin recording you can click the record icon on the toolbar, use the menu options or just press a hotkey.

Camtasia Recorder
Screen capture couldn't be simpler: press F9 and off you go! But don't let the apparent simplicity mislead you. There is a wealth of options available under the hood. You can of course capture any area of the screen, from full screen, regions of the screen or system windows. Output can be to an AVI file for editing later, or more interestingly as a live video source for online applications.

In fact it's here where the tool really gets interesting. When used as an online video stream for conferencing or virtual white-boarding you have access to a set of tools called 'ScreenPad'. These let you add live text boxes, speech balloons and other call-outs to your screen in real time. Other useful live effects include zoom and pan, cursor and object highlighting, water-marking and time stamps.

Camtasia Producer
In offline mode, when all your screen video footage is in the can, the next step is cut it all together - this is the job of Camtasia Producer. It's quick and dirty and will just about do the job, but professional video editors will be appalled. Although it comes with a wealth of cheesy transitions it lacks a live preview, which I would consider a fundamental feature of any video editing tool.

The raw format for the video is AVI, but this is by no means the only supported format. Most importantly for Flash developers is that Camtasia Producer will also create .SWF files. I did some tests on this and the Flash files tended to be around 10% larger than their AVI counterparts. This is not a bad trade-off considering the advantages of having raw video in Flash.

I should also point out that this is not the Sorenson video that arrived with Flash MX, merely a jigsaw of bitmaps and sequential updates. The exported .SWF file comes with a pre-built Stop, Pause and Play button, to control the video. You'll be pleased to know you can pull the .SWF file back into Flash for some surgery if you want to take this stuff out, re-skin it or enhance it.

Camtasia Effects
Although by now most Flashers will have abandoned Camtasia for some serious editing in Flash I should cover the rest of the tools in the suite. The so-called 'Effects' program lets you annotate your video with some very basic shapes, boxes, arrows and text. You can also import your own images (BMP WMF EMF JPG or GIF). GIF index transparency is supported. I guess it does what you need but to a dedicated Flash user it felt incredibly primitive. God knows what an After Effects die-hard would make of it.

Camtasia MenuMaker
This is an odd little application but I guess it could be useful. You name and link all the assets in your presentation and this creates a single menu page of shortcut links. The assets don't have to be videos; they can .SWF files, documents or anything you like. Considering the current power of Flash projector applications though this is little more than a novelty.

Camtasia Player
The AVI files generated by the recorder use a loss-less compression codec developed in-house called TSCC (TechSmith Capture Codec). The quality is really good but if you intend to make this your delivery format then you will need to distribute either the Camtasia Player (CamPlay.exe), the TSCC codec installer or use the 'Pack-and-show' feature in the Producer. This will bundle the whole lot up into a single executable, and is probably the most painless way to deliver a one-off presentation. It also comes with a bunch of extra configuration options.

TechSmith have just announced three Flash MX components to compliment Camtasia Studio. A Movie Loader which acts as a placeholder for your Camtasia Studio-created SWF. A Movie Controller wich adds the ability to 'scrub' back and forth in the Camtasia Studio-created SWF file. It also has optional Play, Pause and Stop buttons and a customizable About box to display movie or authoring information. The third component, Movie Duration, shows the duration and the elapsed time of the SWF file.

Summary
In conclusion, I rate the capture tool very highly. The quality is superb and the Flash output, although not strictly video, is very cleverly done and the filesize overhead is marginal. The post capture tools though are very weak and your average designer or developer is going to find them very restrictive. The whole package has a slightly unnerving Powerpoint feel about it, and I guess this is the market Techsmith are aiming at. Viewed in this light the tools and the MenuMaker program make more sense and will be perfectly sufficient for a middle manager's presentation. As a live video source it is great fun to play with but at US$ 349.00 it's squarely aimed at the business presentation market.
Vist TechSmith

 

About John Dalziel

John Dalziel is a founding member of FlashMagazine and regularly reports from community events in the UK. He has also written for Macromedia, New Riders, Actionscript.com and Ultrashock.com.

 

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