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You have lots of choices here. The answers to the following questions
should help you narrow them a bit.
For example, for starters:
* Are you willing to pay for a tool? If not, you then limit your choices
to those that are offered as Open Source or otherwise free of charge.
While open source stuff is great, sometimes you get what you pay for.
* Does the tool need to faithfully render smooth full motion? Some tools
are better at this than others. For example, I earn my living by
facilitating classes on Adobe Captivate and Adobe RoboHelp. So I'm a
huge Captivate fan. I know Captivate can record in Full Motion capture
mode. It does a fair job. But if I were totally interested in Full
Motion, I'd opt for Camtasia as it does a better job with it.
But if your goal is to capture working with a product where you are
using screen callouts to call attention to various areas of the screen,
Captivate is the better way to fly. It will do a lot of that for you
automatically where Camtasia will make you work to achieve it.
Many of these tools will offer the ability to produce output in a
variety of formats. The Flash format seems to be the most widespread.
Another consideration is to ask:
* How will your users actually view the output? YouTube? LMS? Your Web
Site? CD/DVD?
and:
* Do you need to record from a Web Cam? If so, do you need a "green
screen" to fill the background with different imagery? Camtasia offers
Web Cam recording while Captivate currently doesn't. But Camtasia won't
offer the ability for "green screen". Adobe has a product called Visual
Communicator that can do this. You then are able to output from Visual
Communicator as FLV and use that result in Captivate.
I've probably put more questions in your mind that actually provided any
real answers. But hopefully that's a good thing. Because there is no
single, one size fits all pat answer to this issue! You need to assess
what you want to achieve, then pick the tool (or tools) that best help
you reach that goal.
Cheers... Rick :)
Linda Brownstein wrote:
> I am looking for a good product to capture screen activity and then add
> voice-overs (later). This have to look good when played back on a variety
> of Windows PCs at our customer's sites. Any suggestions and advice? Our
> last venture was with Camtasia and it was 9 years ago, so we're out of
> touch in this area.
>
>
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
> Free Software Documentation Project Web Cast: Covers developing Table of
> Contents, Context IDs, and Index, as well as Doc-To-Help
> 2009 tips, tricks, and best practices.
>http://www.doctohelp.com/SuperPages/Webcasts/
>
> Help & Manual 5: The complete help authoring tool for individual
> authors and teams. Professional power, intuitive interface. Write
> once, publish to 8 formats. Multi-user authoring and version control! http://www.helpandmanual.com/
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^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Free Software Documentation Project Web Cast: Covers developing Table of
Contents, Context IDs, and Index, as well as Doc-To-Help
2009 tips, tricks, and best practices. http://www.doctohelp.com/SuperPages/Webcasts/
Help & Manual 5: The complete help authoring tool for individual
authors and teams. Professional power, intuitive interface. Write
once, publish to 8 formats. Multi-user authoring and version control! http://www.helpandmanual.com/
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