Digital content is produced for many different audiences. While this blog is primarily focused on delivering media to the general audience, this article focuses on digital learning through online media.
Companies like Total Training and Lynda.com have been pushing out frequent content on a large scale. While they differ in quality and strategy, it’s sufficient to indicate that the learning market is large and the underlying technology is extremely important as it often dictates the end result.
Today, Techsmith announced the release of Camtasia for Mac, a video screen recording software. Techsmith is well-known in the PC digital education market, with their Camtasia and SnagIt products.
While Techsmith is not the first company to create screen recording software for the Mac, it’s designed to give it’s two other competitors, Snapz Pro X and Screenflow, a run for their money.
Here’s a brief overview of how the application works:
While launching Camtasia, a user is presented with a fairly simple interface that allows you to select an audio or or camera source. The software also allows you to record system audio.
After recording, video files are automatically imported into a Camtasia project. Similar to Camtasia’s recording interface, it’s editing interface is extremely streamlined and is divided into a canvas, a timeline, and a media/library panel.
Although streamlined, Camtasia’s editing interface is it’s most powerful feature. The following features in particular, make a huge difference:
- SmartFocus: This feature gives editors the ability to automatically focus on the location of the mouse pointer. While this isn’t 100% accurate, it is very usable and cuts down on editing time tremendously.
- File handling: It’s a pleasant surprise to see how well the application managed to work with a number of different file times, including WMV files (with Flip4Mac).
- Export: The site allows 1-click exports to a number of popular destinations, including iTunes, YouTube, and the iPhone.
Although the application has many notable features, the following 2 items are missing and noticeable immediately:
- Export to FLV: The application doesn’t support FLV exports, an essential feature for creating interactive video environments.
- Given the importance of transitions and actions in Camtasia, it’s a little surprising to see that their representative icons are small and difficult to locate, compared to other items of the interface.
Overall, for a 1.0 release, this is a great product and a worthy competitor.
Aside: When I used to create the Creative Cow Premiere Pro podcast, I had to use at least 3 different applications to accomplish the task. With Camtasia for Mac, that number would be reduced to 1.
