For the uninitiated, Camtasia Studio has long been the big beast of
the screen capture world. A way of recording footage of what is
happening on your
PC or
laptop screen,
and editing it into a slick presentation. Previous updates added the
ability to import and edit together video clips, music and images,
making Camtasia a great way of creating video tutorials.
I had to
take my time reviewing Camtasia Studio 8,
because there is so much more to this program than its already
excellent predecessor. I suppose this befits an update two years in the
making. No longer just the best screen-capture program around, Camtasia
Studio 8 is now to all intents and purposes a full-featured video
editor. And a pretty good one, too. Indeed, TechSmith now markets
Camtasia as 'Screen Recording and Video Editing Software'.
Completed projects can be exported to Flash or HTML5, and watched on
iPads,
Android tablets, most
Android smartphones, on
laptops and on
PCs -
and if you host the file on TechSmith's servers, the process of
selecting a format is seemless, delivering an optimized, interactive
project or video on nearly any device with just one output process.
Camtasia Studio 8 costs £213 inc VAT for a single licence, and £70 for
an upgrade.
So. What's new in Camtasia Studio 8?
Camtasia Studio 8: codec
One development of which Camtasia is justfiably proud is the
recording engine - the new TSC2 codec now records at a far smoother
30fps (the previous version topped out at 15fps). This makes viewing
projects noticeably smoother, which may not be a big deal for a simple
screen-capture tutorial, but is critical for projects that include video
and interactive features. More importantly, it means that you can
capture and utilise a wider variety of source material, including full
HD video - of which there is a lot more about now than there was two
years ago.
You can't edit the framrate of content you bring in, of course, so
15fps video you add to a project mostly captured at 30fps may look
something of a wallflower - although if this happened in our testing we
never noticed.
What we did witness is that with great power comes great
responsibility: Camtasia Studio 8 is a proper, modern multimedia tool,
and it requires hardware to match. Import video into your project and
preview it as you work and your PC will be simultaneously decoding and
encoding video, and playing it back. Again, in tests our Core i5 Dell
desktop with 4GB RAM had no problem handling Camtasia Studio, and the
system requirements are refreshingly honest - 2GB RAM is the minimum,
4GB recommended. We wouldn't want to attempt to use Camtasia Studio 8 to
its fullest capacity on anything less powerful than a 4-gig system,
however.
Sharing your finished project is a simple process
Camtasia Studio 8: sharing content
The most significant change in this version is that whereas in
previous versions of Camtasia Studio many of the wizz-bang features
could be exported only to Flash, there's now a dedicated iPhone and iPad
player, although you have to download it from the App Store. Even
better, Camtasia Studio 8 lets you save and view your creations via an
HTML5-enabled custom player. So rather than being locked to laptops and
PC, other mobile devices can view your projects. If you don't have the
means to host your finished video, Camtasia helpfully provides 2GB of
storage on Screencast.com, through which you can host and play your
clip.
So whatever you can create in Camtasia Studio 8, you can share to any
connected device - pretty useful if you are trying to educate, or
market to, a wide and varied audience. Sharing is a simple process,
although with larger, video-heavy files it can take a while.
Camtasia Studio 8: interactive content
TechSmith has added interactive elements to Camtasia Studio 8,
including in-video quizzing, in-video linking to web content and
powerful video-sharing options. It's easy to put together a good-looking
presentation with an interactive quiz, and when you have distributed
your project, easy to harvest meaningful results.
Download full version free