Professional Screencasting Gets A Hand With Camtasia Studio 5

Professional screencasting is, at the moment, a relatively small field, and you can probably count the number of people making a living from screencasts on one hand. Or a couple, maybe. But out of all of the tools available to the would be screencaster, Camtasia Studio makes for an excellent entry-point, and for many people an endpoint. Whether for putting together video software demonstrations, learning materials or information products, Camtasia can come in very handy.

The soon to be released Camtasia Studio 5 is likely to continue in popularizing the format, just as Techsmith’s Jing Project seems to have made an impact in the blogoshphere. What the Jing Project has done for newcomers to screencasting, Camtasia does for those looking to put together a more professional screencast, packing in an impressive feature set.

The latest version has some excellent features, and while they won’t be convincing me to leave my Final Cut Pro and iShowU workflow, I think that I will probably be tempted into checking what’s on offer. Amit Argarwal has put togther a nice teaser review over at Digital Inspiration, and the Techsmith people have been unloosing sneak peek screencasts over the last week or so.

Among the features that are likely to appeal to the would-be screencaster are:

• New transitions and call outs
• Screencast.com integration for easy publishing and sharing
• A “snap-to-app” feature which helps you to instantly resize application windows to standard or custom video dimensions
• A killer feature called Smart Focus, which will let you resize your screencast right down to iPod proportions, and will automatically zoom and pan to maintain visibility throughout. This one is well worth seeing in action.

For me, the last feature is enough to warrant picking up a copy, at least if the feature works as well as it does in the screencast demo. I spend a fair amount of time manually panning and zooming in FCPS2, so it would be nice to use Camtasia to automate that part of my screencasting workflow for me. Should it come out on the mac, I might just indulge.

Where Camtasia falls short for me, consistently, is in its audio and editing capabilities, so it certainly won’t be taking the place of Final Cut for me. Nevertheless, for getting out a fast, professional looking screencast with ease, and its horde of features, I think that this is likely to be the most popular version of the tool yet.

Professional screencasters beware, the market is about to get a fresh influx of newcomers!