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iTunesWelcoming Camtasia Studio as a New Blog Sponsor
February 18th, 2008 | Posted in video 5 Comments »
I’m proud to announce that Camtasia Studio is a new sponsor for my blog. I’ve been using Camtasia Studio to create video tutorials for the past month, and I really like it. I was converted to voice tutorials rather than caption-based tutorials when a user told me he preferred voice 10 to 1. I also prefer voice rather than captions, and voice-screen-demos are a lot easier to create, too.
Camtasia 5 not only excels in voice, but allows you publish the files in a variety of formats that best fit the type of recording. Camtasia Studio is also easy to use. Overall, I think TechSmith’s products are right on target.
You’ll see some Camtasia ads on the sidebar and at the bottom of posts. It’s part of my advertising model — I choose a product I like, and then offer to exchange advertising on my blog in exchange for a free license of the product. Chances are, I’ll probably write a few posts about the tool as well. When enough users click the ads (determined by the product’s value), I’ll remove the ads and put ads for different products there. This advertising model not only helps monetize my blog, it also gives me new tools to write about, and makes me more knowledgeable.
Note that, despite the blog sponsors, the content of my posts will always remain Tom’s authentic opinion. I’ll never write a post promoting a product that I secretly despise.
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Tags: Camtasia Studio, sponsors, TechSmith
Thank you! We switched to Camtasia from Captivate about 6 months ago and could not be more happy with the switch. Simplification is one of our goals this year and Camtasia really helped us with this for both internal and external training.
Thanks for the comment, Tara. Can you give me more details about why you made the switch? In what ways were you trying to simplify things?
Good model! Do you have any examples of your videos?
Chris McQueens last blog post..Don’t Panic!
@ Chris, I’ve been thinking about your comparison to music videos all week. Really, it has made me re-see how to approach videos. I have now started mixing in a lot more visuals outside of the dynamic-mouse-on-the-screen movement. Thanks for leaving the comment.
Do I have examples? I’ll try to post one tomorrow. The problem is that everything I create for work is proprietary, and when I come home, I don’t have the energy to create a really compelling tutorial (it takes me about 4 hrs to create a tutorial with compelling visuals). But I think I have one that is generic and outside of my projects.
I am evaluating Camtasia vs Captivate right now. Here are some thoughts on the pros and cons of each
Camtasia pros:
* really cool zoom-and-pan: means you can reduce size of output
* highlight features grays out most of screen to show only highlight
Camtasia cons:
* difficult to edit once done. I want to record the audio separately from the action (based on a written text), so I need to synchronize audio and video. Basically making changes to the audio means you have to start the synchronization again from scratch. Partly because moving markers and callouts is difficult (it’s not possible to select several and move them). If I opt for Camtasia I will have to impose a workflow like 1) record screen 2) write audio text 3) get approval 4) record audio 5) synchronize 6) add call ins and zooms
Captivate pros:
* easier to move slides around and edit the audio
* possible to add in interactivity
Captivate cons:
* strange bugs reported by disgruntled users
* lacks cool zoom and pan + highlight features
* ridiculous pricing
* Adobe is very much playing the dominant company, imposing a non-standard help mechanism that takes ages to load (and behaves in weird ways), arrogant and unhelpful support, etc.