Product Reviews

Camtasia Studio comes from TechSmith, maker of the popular SnagIt screen-capture utility. But while SnagIt captures basic on-screen video, Camtasia Studio takes this idea and runs with it. If you're producing computer-based training, this is a must-have.

Like SnagIt, Camtasia Studio is a collection of connected applications that you can access individually or via the central LaunchPad. The most important module, Camtasia Recorder, is also the simplest. Here, you set up your screen capture to be the full screen, current window, a marked-out area or a specified fixed region. Hit the Record button and all the screen activity within that area - including cursor movements, menu selections, typing and so on - along with your audio commentary, is losslessly captured to an AVI file.

Camtasia Recorder also offers extra features that are tailored towards producing software-training videos. These include the ability to highlight the cursor and any clicks, brand the video with a watermark or logo, automatically pan the view, draw on-screen and add annotations.

Getting your capture the way you want it first time is a tall order, so TechSmith has provided the Camtasia Effects module for post-processing. Here, you can add objects such as callouts, arrows, text and WMF images to your video, complete with control over colour, fill style, line style, grouping and so on. Once added and formatted, you set their duration on-screen (sadly, there are no animation capabilities) and export your new enhanced AVI.

Rather than trying to cover everything in a single take, it's often better to break a large project into smaller, more manageable units, and these can be brought together in the Camtasia Producer module. Running down the left of the Producer window is an Explorer-style view of your hard disk, which shows all supported graphic and video formats as thumbnails. These files can be dragged and dropped into the Storyboard window in the desired order, and it's possible to set up transitions too. Double-clicking an element opens it for editing, and you're able to set in and out points for your video, speed up or slow down playback and, using the integrated

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Audio Editor, fade in/fade out, insert WAV files or silences and re-record sections of the commentary.

You're now ready to export your finished extravaganza for viewing. One of the great strengths of Camtasia Studio is that it uses TechSmith's own Screen Capture Codec (TSCC), which is optimised for desktop recording and ensures the results are lossless and highly compressed, which is essential for video-based training. TechSmith also provides an EXE to make distributing and installing the codec as simple as possible, but an even better solution is to distribute the Camtasia Player. This is a small standalone player that works on all 32-bit versions of Windows without any setup and has TSCC support built in. Best of all, you can use Camtasia's Pack-and-Show command to bundle the player and your video in a single EXE.

TSCC-based AVI is the most efficient delivery route in most cases, but Camtasia Studio doesn't tie you to it. Using the Produce Movie command or step-by-step Production Wizard, you can choose from a number of alternative standards, including animated GIF and MOV (if you have QuickTime installed). The most useful built-in options are the popular streaming formats: Real Media (RM), Windows Media (WMV) and now Flash (SWF), which come into their own for cross-platform web delivery. In each case, the control over your output is comprehensive, letting you choose target bit rates, frame settings and so on. With Flash output, you can even specify a preloader and an end Jump to URL, and Producer will produce the HTML code to host your SWF.

But that's not all, as Camtasia Studio has one final trick up its sleeve. If you're producing material for fixed delivery, it makes a huge difference if you can provide some sort of front end for your videos, and you can do this with the Camtasia MenuMaker module.

The easiest way to set up your front end is to use the MenuMaker Wizard and choose from one of the five pre-supplied templates (there are more on the website). Once you've added your files, they appear as a simple customisable list, and you can also set up sounds to be played on startup, on a mouse click and so on. You're then ready to test your menu and, when you're happy with it, select the Create Menu command. This creates a master EXE file and copies it along with all the necessary media files to a specified directory, which can be burnt to CD. TechSmith also provides a separate application, Theater, to create an interactive menu-based front end for your Flash-based videos.

Being shown how to do something is always more effective than being told and, if you're thinking of producing software-based training, Camtasia Studio provides an excellent all-round solution from initial recording through to final delivery.