Moving Away from Camtasia Studio?
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Introduction:
Screen recording software is available in many different flavours. They’re all essentially the same kind of thing and which one you use depends on what you’re producing and what you’re main focus is. If you’re a gamer, you might prefer something like Fraps or Shadowplay or maybe Bandicam. If you’re more about tutorials and distance education, then you will have undoubtedly come across Camstudio (free) or the extremely well established Camtasia Studio from Techsmith (not related to Camstudio despite the name).
Moving Away From Camtasia?
I have always opted for Camtasia Studio and have also invested in a licence for this software (it's not cheap but is reasonable for what it does). It’s well thought through and the workflow for creating good presentation material is about as slick as it could be. The video above, however, looks at why I’m starting to move away from using Camtasia and considering using Bandicam as an alternative. Camtasia is starting to feel like an old 5 star hotel. Truly excellent at what it does but starting to look a bit old and tired. I also show here how you can use the excellent Techsmith codec in Bandicam but at a much more respectable 2560x1440px which is way above what Camtasia can support (with a Camtasia license). For this though, you will need an external editor as the Studio software is also limited resolution wise. All a bit rubbish really.My main gripe here is that Techsmith don’t really seem to be developing the Camtasia platform much. Updates are few and far between. They have still not implemented support for anything over FHD despite a community of gamers, educators and even video professionals requesting this feature for years now. Even the long past upgrade from v.7 to v.8 didn’t really offer anything spectacular in terms of more 2016’esque presentation and graphic design standards. Camtasia Studio is basically a very simple video editing tool. It has specialist presentation features built in as standard but that's really it. This is not a bad thing. It attracts those who don’t have access to or the desire to learn or work with a more in depth nonlinear editor (NLE) such as Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro. It also has a market of gamers out there who find this a more flexible tool to use. They can either edit videos captured elsewhere or to actually capture action (though for technical reasons, it’s not really best for this). Then there are people like me...the tutorialists (this is not a real word but it should be) for whom it is ideal in so many ways.
In Summary:
In short, Techsmith have an amazing product. However, it needs 2K and UHD support and an update to the dreadfully Word 2000 library of graphics and callouts. I almost expect a paperclip to say, “Hello!” to me sometimes. Some of you may understand that reference but a very re-assuring increasing number will not.If you are a Camtasia user or can suggest better alternatives or methods, I’d love to hear from you.