Camtasia

When it comes to producing professional-looking movies and demos from your computer screen, TechSmith's Camtasia Studio is known for striking the right balance between a powerful toolset and ease of use. Version 8, released today, adds even more useful features that encourage end-user interactivity without making the app any more complex to use.

The feature-packed screencast app, which includes HD production settings, does have a learning curve, but the user-friendly interface and front-and-center icons for most-used tools go a long way toward lowering the intimidation factor a notch. Plus, TechSmith provides a useful online help center that includes several … Read more

Camtasia for Mac received an update today that makes it easy to create professional screencasts (capturing all actions on screen) for demonstration videos, instructional videos, and other screen-recording projects. Some new features offered in version 2.1 of the software should make it even more useful, adding new Clip Speed and Remove a Color options to add to your screencasts.

Clip Speed lets you adjust play speed easily The new Clip Speed feature can be accessed from the Video FX tab, and lets you speed through slow processes in a demonstration or slow down a faster process you want your … Read more

Anyone interested in producing professional-looking movies and demos from the computer screen needs some quality screencasting software, and TechSmith's Camtasia definitely fits the bill. This app strikes the perfect balance between powerful tools and ease of use.

Considering the relatively minor boost in version number, Camtasia offers quite a few feature updates. The program now includes the capability to record system audio, as well as automatically resize windows during recording. Plus, you get the option to "smartfocus" on key frames and add closed captions to your presentation. Additonally, the app offers speech-to-text with a voice training feature; … Read more

Though the Big Five browsers duke it out to see which one can come up with the best mix of speed, compatibility, and add-ons, social networking bruisers Flock 3 and RockMelt beta have taken off the kid gloves to beat each other senseless over Twitter and Facebook integration. We pit the two minor leaguers against one another in a head-to-head blog with plenty of video goodness to keep you interested.

In other news, iTunes 10.1 is out now, and with it comes AirPlay, the new feature that will allow videos to be streamed to an Apple TV. Apple introduced … Read more

Not long ago, my uncle enlisted my help on a project he was conducting through the hospital where he works.

His task: to create a tutorial that would be used in an ongoing training course for other physicians. My uncle is a neonatalogist, chemist, and hobbyist beer brewer, but no video producer. Furthermore, there was little budget for his leg of the undertaking. He needed simple software to capture mouse movements on the computer screen--in the end, the freeware TipCam saw him through.

TipCam isn't the only screencast software out there, and it certainly isn't a one-size-fits-all solution. … Read more

When it comes to producing professional-looking movies and demos from your computer screen, TechSmith's Camtasia Studio continues to strike the right balance between a powerful toolset and ease of use. Version 7.1 adds even more features without making the app any more complex to use.

The feature-packed screencast app--which includes HD production settings--does have a learning curve, but the user-friendly interface and front-and-center icons for most-used tools go a long way toward lowering the intimidation factor a notch. Plus, TechSmith povides a useful online help center that includes several video tutorials that do a nice job walking users … Read more

The freemium screen capture and screen recording application Jing received an update on Tuesday that adds new video functionality to paying users, and a few other enhancements for all Mac and Windows users.

Two hotkeys now help Jing's capture crosshairs snap to common aspect ratios. Press Ctrl to maintain a 4:3 aspect ratio and Shift for 16:9 widescreen proportions. While locked into a ratio, dragging out the crosshair shows you boundaries for common screen measurements within that ratio that you can easily snap to, like 320?240 or 640?480. This is a nice addition in keeping … Read more

TechSmith raises the bar with version 6 of Camtasia Studio, which was released Wednesday. While the essentials remain the same in this feature-stuffed software for creating and producing screen recordings, a few well-placed adjustments and capabilities make their mark in creating overall faster screencasts.

Among the changes, support for high-definition (Blu-ray) video, independently editable audio and video tracks, and time-saving hot keys are the most critical.

The ability to produce HD-quality screencasts (for the Web and mobile phones) is cool for those with HD computers, but on the technical side, the HD-friendly format (MPEG-4 AVC format with H.264 compression) … Read more

YouTube isn't the only way to share video, and it's certainly not the way to store and share professional screencasts with hiked-up bitrates. After 18 months as a beta mewling, on Wednesday, TechSmith's Screencast.com graduated to a full-fledged release.

Version 1 of Screencast.com continues to receive screen recordings produced in the freeware Jing Project (for Windows and Mac) and premium Camtasia Studio, though it's available to anyone willing to register and pay for storage. It has come some distance from the site covered by Webware.com as part of a July 2007 review of … Read more