Camtasia 5 Review

There are so many screen recording products now available that, frankly, I’ve lost count of them. You might think that they are all much of a muchness - each one of them is capable of recording what you see and do on your computer screen and outputting it as a movie - so you might as well just buy the cheapest.

In fact, they are certainly not all alike. There are huge differences between competing packages not only in their features, but also in their ease of use and reliability. Over the past few years I’ve used a number of the best known packages and the one I now use in preference to all others is Camtasia. Why? Mainly because it is reliable. I’ve never had problems with skipped frames, unsynchronized sound or corrupted graphics (as I have with some other packages). In addition to that, it is incredibly feature-rich and is also reasonably easy to use.

I have reviewed Camtasia 3 and Camtasia 3.1 before. Version 5 retains the features of those earlier releases and, in spite of a number of new functions and user interface improvements, its basic tools and environment are, broadly speaking, little changed. If you are unfamiliar with Camtasia my earlier reviews will give you a pretty detailed overview.

The first new thing which caught my attention in Camtasia 5 was something called SmartFocus. This is a tool which, in effect, gives you a virtual ‘cameraman’ that follows your screen activity and automatically zooms in on the areas of interest. SmartFocus can be applied when you edit a previously recorded movie. This means that you can record a large area of the screen and then let SmartFocus produce a version of the movie in which your actions are tracked. As you move around the screen, the movie will zoom in on any areas of interest. You don’t have to use SmartFocus if you don’t want to. However, as a way of cramming a large-screen recording into a small-screen playback area (say for Web viewing), this is incredibly useful.

I am pleased to see that one of my criticisms in a previous review has now been addressed too. Historically, Camtasia produced Flash format movies in the form of three Flash (swf) files - one for the movie, one for the control bar and another as a ‘preloader’ to be displayed while the movie is downloading. These were tied together at runtime with some javascript, xml and html files. The end result works ok but is inconvenient when uploaded to a web site - especially if you want to embed Flash movies into dynamically generated pages (say in a PHP-driven blog or CMS). Camtasia 5 now has an option to output a movie in just four files - the html page, one xml file, one javascript file and a single swf file. Arguably this is still not quite as simple as it might be but it is, nonetheless, a big improvement.

In terms of functionality, I really don’t have any major criticisms of Camtasia 5. My main gripe is that the sound tends to break up a bit when played back in the editor. This can make it difficult to do precise editing based on the soundtrack. This does not affect the quality of the sound in the finished movie, however. In addition, I think there is scope to make Camtasia’s various component parts more tightly integrated. There are separate applications for making menus of various sorts and editing audio. Even though I’ve used Camtasia quite a bit over the years, I still don’t know my way around all the Camtasia applications. If all these standalone applications are really needed (and I am not entirely certain that they are), I’d like to see them integrated into the main editing environment.

Camtasia 5 is not the cheapest screen recording software on the market. If you are on a tight budget a simpler product such as BB Flashback / Flashback Express ($199 and $39 respectively) or Wink (free) might suffice. But, in my view, if you need to produce a large number of professional quality screencasts, Camtasia 5 is clearly the one to get.