for more information on this award, see HERE

While it is only a ‘0.1’ upgrade, there are in fact some quite significant new features in this release of Camtasia. For example, it can now export movies straight to the Flash video FLV format in addition to the traditional Flash SWF format which it supported previously. The FLV format is optimised for high definition video playback which can be streamed or progressively downloaded from the Internet or played locally from a hard disk or CD.

With Camtasia 3.1, you can record and preview a video narration at the same time that you record screen activity (here I am working on a demo recording of Macromedia Dreamweaver)

Unlike most other screen recording tools, Camtasia lets you put ‘live action’ video from your camcorder or webcam right into a recording of your computer screen. This provides a great way of adding the human touch to tutorials and software demos; video clips let you can talk ‘face to face’ with the viewer.

In Camtasia 3.0, video clips were limited to a ‘picture in picture’ display in which the clip was shown in a little box off to one corner of the screen. In Camtasia 3.1, the status of video clips has been elevated; now they can be played ‘side-by-side’ with the main movie. In fact, you can divide up your screen so that the rectangle in which the camera video is shown can take up as much (or even more) screen space as the screen recording.

The Production Wizard provides ready-to-use screen layouts

A Production Wizard lets you pick a variety of pre-defined screen layouts with different ‘panes’ to contain the main recording, selection menus, video inserts and so on. Once you’ve selected a layout you can fine-tune the display by resizing the individual panes interactively or selecting a screen size (say a screen resolution such as 800x600 or 1280x1024) and letting the software work out the optimal dimensions to fit everything into the available space.

Camera video can either be recorded on its own and imported later or it can be recorded simultaneously with the recording of screen activity to ensure that your commentary is synchronized with screen actions. All in all, this is a very neat feature indeed. Incidentally, the problems I had with recording from a Sony camcorder in Camtasia 3.0 (as noted in my review) seem to have disappeared in this new release. Everything went without a hitch.

A few added extras include a an audio slider built in to the playback control and the option to created a collapsible indented menu system, a bit like a Word outline, with each subheading giving instant access to a specific ‘scene’ of your movie.

However, the complete range of menu building options is spread out over several applications: while you can define a simple navigation menu for a single movie in the main editing screen, in order to create menus from which to launch multiple movies you have to use one of two standalone tools – the MenuMaker or Camtasia Theatre. Suffice to say, choosing and using the right menu making options is not entirely intuitive and I hope it will be simplified in future releases.

Here I am creating a table of contents to allow users to navigate my movie using a 'collapsible outline'

You can now add captions to videos with a point-and-click interface for selecting specific passages from a pre-written script so that the display of captions is updated as the video plays in the same way that subtitles are often displayed in foreign language films. There are also some enhancements to help with batch production of videos, creating interactive quizzes and the recording of PowerPoint presentations. For a comprehensive guide to all the new features, you can view a 31 minute screencast demonstration on the Camtasia site.

Techsmith really is doing a great job with Camtasia. It isn’t the cheapest screen recorder around, nor is it the easiest to master; the sheer range of its features mean that you will need to put in a bit of effort to learn how to use it to its full potential. However, if you need to record really slick presentations, demos or tutorials with a high degree of interactivity; or if you need to mix screen and camera recordings in a single video, then Camtasia Studio 3.1 is simply the best.

Huw Collingbourne

February 2006