If you are or aspire to be a professional screencaster, putting together killer screen recordings that look great on your website - or those of your clients - you are definitely going to want to check out Camtasia Studio 5, from Techsmith.
And if for some reason you need further encouragement to shell out $299 for it - which is peanuts by professional video editing software standards - head over to my in-depth, blow-by-blow review over at Master New Media, to get a better idea why this is a must-have piece of kit.
Short of giving you extra time in your schedule, making your voice over less monotonous, and shooting your recording for you Camtasia Studio 5 will do pretty much everything else, and a whole lot of stuff you would never have even asked for.
And if you are still not satisfied with that, the only thing left is to hire me to do it for you.
8 Comments
Michael,
I bought 5 last night and put together a short 5-second clip using an animated gif, and a zoom. In the preview window it looked great, but when I produced to swf, the speed of the zoom and animation was way out of wack. I submitted a tech ticket on this and hope to hear back from TechSmith shortly (which they always are good at). Have you experienced any of this?
Also, unless I’m blind (and I was working at midnight mind you), I couldn’t find where I can change the fps output of my movie.
Regards
Shane
Hi Shane
That sucks. I only used some video and browser screen capture in my testing, but no problems with it. Will take a look and test this out a bit, sounds like a nightmare.
Let me have a look at CS5 later to see where the framerate setting were. I remember seeing something in the recording settings somewhere, but it evades me now. Will get back to you on that one if I find it before you do!
further problems - due to unpredictable results in 5, I created a project in 4, but 98% of the way through, I had to do a screen capture of 5, so I closed 4, opened 5, did the recording (using recorder 4), closed 5, opened 4 again, and placed the clip on the time line. Soon after that, I could not place any other images on the time line and the program said it experienced problems and had to shut down. I’m totally stuck now. I tried uninstalling 5 to see if the gdiplus.dll problem would fix itselt, but it didn’t. Now I have no version 5 and a version 4 that I can’t use to finish my product.
I’m hoping tech support can help me. I’m going to try and download a Windows Updater for .NET 1 and 2 and see if that works but nothing is guaranteed.
I’m not happy about this at all right now, nor with version 5 as a whole.
Frustrated
Shane
Wow, sounds like it’s been a nightmare from beginning to end. Sorry to hear that and thanks for sharing your experiences here. I hope Tech Support gets this sorted for you.
Keep me posted - I’d love this one to have a happy ending, and soon.
Sounds like you’re working on a “meta”-screencast? Screencasting screencasting? Interesting stuff.
Update: For anybody experiencing this problem, you can work around the gdiplus.dll problem by inserting blank title clips with the image you want as a background to the title clip. However, it appears that once you have this dll problem, when you go to produce to swf, the audio isn’t there. Totally blows. As a work around, I had to produce to flv. Still waiting on tech support.
Thanks for sharing the hack, Shane. Hopefully they will resolve this for you quickly - it sucks to have this kind of thing going on when you are at a crisis point in a project. Been there myself before with other tools, and it be quite distressing I know!
Update: TechSmith recommended that I upgrade from 4.0 to 4.02 and my problem with producing to swf was solved(probably because a new gfiplus.dll was installed with the install, so who knows if it’s actually the new version or getting a new dll).
I still have not reinstalled 5, since I need to get some projects done and I can’t afford additional setbacks. But, I will reinstall 5 later and see if I have any problems and let you know.
I sure hope with the next version of Camtasia Studio TechSmith creates that they build in the ability to record a recording without having to use an older program or knowing how to set up virtual machines to do so. For this built in feature, I’d pay for an upgrade.
Regards
Shane
Hi Shane
Thanks for the update. Good to hear that there was some kind of fix, and hope you get a more substantial solution soon.
Guess I didn’t encounter the problem myself because I’m recording on a mac, with Camtasia in a virtual machine.