What Is Camtasia?

Camtasia is basically a screen recording program that provides the following functions:

Voice Recording

You can provide voice narrations for your video, either while you are recording the screen or afterwards.

Export To A Variety Of Formats

With Camtasia you can produce the final movie in the following formats:

• Flash (FLV or SWF)
• WMV - Windows Media streaming video
  
• MOV - QuickTime Movie
• AVI
• iPod/Itunes
• MP3 - audio only
• RM - RealMedia streaming media
• CAMV - Camtasia for Realplayer streaming media
• GIF animation

The mind boggles at what a video tutorial produced as a gif animation would look like. I hesitate to try. Most of the video tutorials I've made have been designed for presentation on a web page and so they have been exported in either SWF or FLV. Some videos have been destined for higher quality presentation on DVDs so .MOV was the movie format of choice.

Zoom and Pan

To emphasize particular areas of the screen you can zoom in on them. This is particularly useful if you are recording at a large resolution and it might otherwise be hard for the viewer to see exactly what you are doing in that part of the screen. Zooms can be smooth or instant.

Transitions

There are some basic transitions available using effects such as checkerboard, pixelate etc. Their names give a good clue as to what they look like. If you have two separate recordings you might introduce a transition to move the viewer gently from the first to the second.

Menus

Camtasia enables you to create menus allowing the viewer to jump directly to a chosen video. If you have a large selection of videos, it may make more sense to provide a menu as opposed to forcing the user to sit through them all sequentially. Menus can be geared towards web or CD presentation, with the CD route also offering an autostart function that is triggered when the CD is loaded.

Typically users use Camtasia to produce the following kinds of movies:

• Video tutorials
• Marketing presentations
• Software demos