Rather, like dedicated video editing software, it is primarily organised around audio and visual timelines that determine what appears on the screen, and when. Camtasia is not slide-based like Captivate. However, there are important differences. You can import and edit audio files, and create and produce short videos that have nothing at all to do with the recording on your screen’s desktop, if you wish.Ĭamtasia’s rich feature set means it is often compared with Adobe’s Captivate or MadCap’s Mimic, and if you already have or use one of these you may wonder whether you need Camtasia at all. More significantly, it also offers a full-featured editing suite, including animations, transitions and annotation tools. Camtasia can embed video both from other sources such as QuickTime or MP4 files from your hard drive and from your computer’s iSight or webcam. It does all of the above and a whole lot more. While these products are fine for basic screencasting work, they lack the features to make really professional, corporate-quality videos. Like Jing, it includes the ability to share your screen capture online freely on TechSmith’s own site. SnagIt also allows users to capture video, save it and share it, as well as add some basic annotations. It provides relatively little in the way of either editing or playback options, but does include free online sharing. Jing is a free product and ideal for making what are sometimes called ‘quick and dirty’ screen captures. It is so frustrating to have such a useful, innovative piece of hardware sitting there gagged, blindfolded, one arm and two legs tied behind its back when it could be doing so much more.There is no shortage of screencasting software on the market, so where does Camtasia fit in the grand scheme of things? Camtasia’s developer, TechSmith, offers two other screen capture products: Jing and SnagIt. After only a short while I began to think how cool it would be to be able to use the SP in Premiere or Vegas video, as a jog/zoom control, or why not in MS flightsim as a 6DOF viewer in the new virtual cockpits or even HalfLife2. There is nothing else on the market that I know of (at an affordable price) that comes close to it.

I bought my Spacepilot specifically for use in Solidworks and it revolutionised the way I could interact with the model. We have one of the most innovative pieces of hardware, crying out to have a driver which lets us, the users use it in all sorts of innovative ways yet it is left to those very users to come up with the wherewithall. I'm a programmer and will download the SDK and give it a shot.

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