Screen Recorders for Streaming
Studio also lets you enhance the video in other ways. Tools that Camtasia calls "Callouts" let you overlay graphics (such as arrows, balloon help, or text notes) on the recording. You can drop triggers on the timeline to "Zoom-n-Pan" across parts of your video, or add hotspots that will react to user mouse clicks (provided you use the Macromedia Flash export option).
With all the output options Camtasia provides you're sure to be able to support any platform for playback, although the screencap codecs are only available for Windows. Using Studio, you can export your finished presentation in all the standard video formats (including AVI, WM9 (screen codec or regular), RealVideo (screen codec or regular), and Quicktime), as well as some surprising ones (such as Flash and animated GIF). For the streaming video formats, Camtasia presents all the streaming encoding settings you'd expect to see for targeting audiences, codecs, and bandwidth. If you select Flash, and you'll be presented with options for frame rate, audio codec (MP3 is the default), and what sort of playback controls the finished Flash presentation should include (right up to a video-style start/stop/timeline slider bar with elasped time display).
Camtasia supports live presentations...sort of. The Camtasia screen recorder can be set up as a standard video source device, available to other applications that take live video input. If you do this, Helix Producer or Windows Media Encoder see the Camtasia Recorder as if it was a video camera. It's a clever way to get screencap video just about anywhere you need it, although putting all the pieces (encoder, server, etc) together is left to you.
In short, Camtasia is a great tool for personal creation of desktop-oriented multimedia. If you know something about digital media, you'll quickly feel at home with its interface and its ability to export your creation in numerous delivery formats. It's simple to use, and is optimized for the individual contributor who needs the power and flexibility to be creative in production and post-production. In the next part of this article, we'll look at Screenwatch and see how it trades away the ability to do post-production in favor of simplicity for the creator and scalability for the enterprise.