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Camtasia Studio 7

Professional screencasting tool
Tuesday 13 April 2010.
 

Camtasia Studio 7
$299 / £220 (inc VAT)
TechSmith
http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp

Camtasia Studio is such a mature, feature-rich product that it becomes increasingly difficult to imagine what new features are left to be crammed into it. The most obvious change to the new version, Camtasia Studio 7, is the redesigned user interface. This look much slicker than the previous release. It also incorporates some new tools and resources.

The video editing environment is divided into three main areas. As before, the video preview is on the right of the screen and the timeline runs across the bottom. It is in area at the top-left of the screen that most of the major changes have been made.

This area now contains a stack of tabbed pages which makes it much easier to switch between functional areas of the software. Previously many areas - devoted, say, to narration or transitions - were ‘modal’ so that you had to open and close them repeatedly. Now you can switch between them far more easily by selecting their tabs.

Camtasia Studio 7 includes a variety of new effects such as these freehand-style animated ‘callouts’.

At the top of the stack of pages is the Clip Bin. This is where you can put previously-recorded video and audio tracks ready to be dragged into the timeline. The next tabbed page is the Library. This is a new area which lets you store tracks for reuse in any project; the Clip Bin contains tracks related to the currently project only whereas the Library might contain elements such as logos, credit sequences, sound-effects or background music which you may want to use repeatedly across multiple projects. The Camtasia Library is pre-populated with some ready-to-use music and ‘background animation’ video tracks plus some ‘mouse click’ sound effects.

The other tabs provide pages of Callouts (arrows, boxes, and highlights), Zoom and Pan to let you edit a video by magnifying a section or moving from one part of the recorded screen to another at selected points, an Audio page in which you can adjust the volume or activate noise removal, a Transitions page to let you apply fades and wipes between one clip and another, Cursor Effects to add highlights to the mouse pointer or show little animations over the pointer when a mouse button is clicked, Title Clips to store still images for title or credits sections of a video, Voice Narration to record audio over an existing video, Record Camera to insert a webcam recording and Picture in Picture to let you drop an image or video (typically though not necessarily a webcam recording) into a rectangular area overlaying the main video.

Many of the above features existed, albeit in a slightly different form, in the previous version of Camtasia and the new tabbed arrangement might be regarded as more of a usability improvement rather than completely new functionality. But there are functional enhancements too. These include improved SmartFocus - a tool which zooms in and out of your video to enlarge the ‘active regions’ automatically. Other news things that I particularly like are the animated sketch-style callouts that seem to draw freehand boxes and squares over selected items when you want to highlight them in a video. And the timeline has been improved too. Not only can you now copy and paste clips from one part of the timeline to another but you can also apply audio editing to, for example, increase the volume of a selection or fade it in or out. There are also some new cursor effects so you can put highlights or warp effects over your cursor or have mouse-click sound effects added automatically.

You can switch to different areas using the tabs seen here above the timeline. Here I am editing the audio on the timeline by adjusting the volume and adding fade-in and fade-out effects.

There is an automated YouTube uploader which can send your new video to YouTube instead of requiring that you log into YouTube and upload it from there. The YouTube default is still, curiously, set to the old low definition format, 640x480, though there is an alternative YouTube-compatible HD preset, 1280 x 720. Personally, I would have liked to see a larger range of predefined YouTube formats but you can make up for this omission, with a bit of effort, by defining your own reusable production settings.

Apart from the editing environment, the main other component of Camtasia Studio is the screen recording tool. TechSmith claims that this has been improved in a variety of ways. For example, XP users should be able to achieve smoother recordings while users of Vista or Windows 7 on dual core systems should see a 40-50% improvement in the capture frame rate.

Camtasia Studio 7 is an extremely fully featured screen recording and editing suite and has for some time (at least since Camtasia 5) had more functionality than most people will ever need. Even so, TechSmith continues to refine and improve the product to make sure that it keeps up with the times. Camtasia 7 is a good update which, even though it doesn’t have many completely new features, has numerous small improvements which combine to make the software both technically better and easier to use than before. In short, I’ve used a lot of screen recorders over the years. In my view, Camtasia 7 is the best.

- Also: Camtasia Studio 6 review
- Camtasia Features and demo videos: http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia/whatsnew.asp

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