Can anyone recommend the best video capture software for doing pc video captures for online tutorials. What are the best free software and best paid. I have heard that Camtasia is good and see a lot of people using it.
As far as paid screen capture goes, I use Camtasia and it's excellent. There's also Captivate (if it's still available), formerly by Macromedia but the reports I heard about it weren't weren't that glowing. There's quite a supportive forum for Camtasia users too, if you run into problems.
Yeah, Camtasia is a good paid program. For a good free presentation program, you should give Wink a try. It outputs in flash format so it's quicker to load in a browser.
Camtasia is simply the best! Remember, you can get 30 Day free trial - if you need it for 1 project, it's more than enough to make it for free.
Camtasia is excellent!! - i've used it for months. it easy to use. another program i've used is Snagit, it fairly okay.
Theres something called Hypercam, free although it's not very good unless you pay for the license. You should use it if you wanna do long captures because it doesn't take up very much space
wow.. this is very new for me.. Can anyone teach me what purpose of these software? Is it just for capture common video or our action in PC?
I have done the "free trial" thing with Captivate, and with Camtasia Studio, as well as Snag-It (also from the makers of Camtasia). Captivate (now "Captivate 2") is more pricey, but I think it integrates directly into Macromedia/Adobe's "Breeze" platform (which was recently renamed to Adobe Acrobat Connect). Breeze is/was an enterprise-wide (which translates to buku buck$$$) system for delivering multimedia learning and such using, amongst other things, video screen capture. As I recall, price was in the $500+ range for captivate...but you will want to double check this. Camtasia is a lot cheaper ($299 if memory serves) and does many of the similar things. I do not think/know that it integrates with Breeze well (or at all...but since Flash is the underlying technology I would THINK it would...but do not take my word for it). I have been playing with Camtasia and have been impressed with it, though some of the stuff it does seems to have less "polish" than the Adobe/Macromedia offerings. However, for my money I think Camtasia is the better value...but try them both for yourself. Now...here is an interesting thing for you. Others have mentioned "Snag-It". If funds are low, take a close look at that tool. IT IS ONLY $39!!! It can do more with screen captures than the entire Camtasia tool can do (in fact, TechSmith offers a bundle of Camtasia + Snagit) and may just suit your needs. I think it is a good buy. A word of warning about Captivate and Camtasia, and other tools like them. If you decide to use the feature that lets you link it into Microsoft Powerpoint and then record presentations, you MUST have Powerpoint 2000 or later. If you are an old hold-out like me and have Powerpoint 97 (because I wasn't forking over more $$$ for MS-Monopoly when I didn't need more than Office 97) you will find that the integration piece with Powerpoint does not work. They do state this in the requirements (I am not bashing them), and I was just saying that it is confirmed by me. Thus, for me to use that functionality I would also have to invest in the later version of Powerpoint. These are wonderful tools for many different applications. Good luck in your endeavors!
I've used Camtasia recently to capture the process of web surfing various sites - these captures were then converted to quicktime movies and then mapped onto 3D modelled computer monitors which were used in an animated video for a very high profile client. Camtasia was excellent for this - I'd definietly recommend it.
You can capture video that is playing on the screen but you can also record your actions (i.e. mouse movements, selecting from menus etc). People use these screen recordings for things like tutorials, software demos and presentations.
Oo..that's what i see many IM use that to teach something via their tutorials. In my opinion, the size of the video are so big.. and i need more storage to save them in my disk.. anybody can recommend software that can create small size of video? or any skills to compress it?
I'm not a Camtasia evangelist.... but Camtasia can compress very well. The format you export to influences the file size. The video I made on this page is 2.5 mins long and uses 5.5Mb to give you an idea. That's a SWF. Sorenson Squeeze is good for compressing movies also.
New Camtasia 7 is one of the professional software packages that works great and even thought it's pricey, it's not the highest priced on the market.
I have used all software ( trial and paid version ) and give my best rate to Camtasia. But should depend on your budget and feature required.