If you're involved in training people to do things under Windows, whether it's using common applications, browsing the Web or changing Windows' settings, one of the most effective ways of teaching is using a video to run through the actual mouse movements you make and the keys you type to achieve the result.

Camtasia Studio 6 records all this, with an audio track so you can include a narration or comments. It enables you to assemble a video from a number of clips, too, which is essential if you're not completely fluent in front of the ‘camera'. Clips can be positioned on a timeline or storyboard, reordered and edited by trimming sections out of them.

Editing operations are not as intuitive as they could be, though. For example, a common requirement is to trim off the start or end of a clip. How easy this would be if you could stop playback and delete from the cursor position to the start or end of the current clip with a keyboard shortcut. Instead, you have to create a marker at the cursor position and another at the start or end of the clip and then click the scissors icon (the Delete key doesn't work for cutting).

There are some handy video-wide effects, such as normalising the level of the audio track to process louder and quieter passages. Transitions between clips are useful, too, as are callouts, where you can add graphics and speech bubbles to a video to emphasise particular details or actions.

Another great tool is SmartFocus. When you import clips onto the timeline, or if you ask the program to reapply SmartFocus, Camtasia automatically works through your clip and zooms in when it detects you're working in a reduced area of the screen. If you open a dialogue or a menu, for example, it'll zoom into that, showing more detail of what you're likely to be working with. The auto-detection can be a bit over enthusiastic, adjusting the zoom too often, but you can delete SmartFocus markers from the timeline to tailor the changes.

Once the video is complete, Camtasia can render it to a number of different formats, including H.264 /MPEG-4. Whether the time was right to drop support for the Flash Video FLV format, still relatively common on Web sites, is debatable, but the program produces tightly compressed, high-quality output and includes its own player, which can be embedded in a Web page or included for free on a production CD.

Verdict
It's reasonably easy to produce screen videos with Camtasia Studio 6, though the editing facilities could be more intuitive. This is no Adobe Premiere, but improvements like being able to detach and edit a soundtrack separately from its video, and to zoom in on areas of interest, make producing professional screen tutorials much more convenient than before.

Company: Techsmith

Contact: 01364 654100

Tags: camtasia studio windows keyboard shortcut camtasia video editing multimedia digital video shareware