Re: Need opinions: Camtasia versus Captivate

[Rick Stone <rstone75 -at- kc -dot- rr -dot- com>]

Hi Craig

Personally, I use both and I've trained others on both.

Captivate rocks for its ability to capture sequences on a slide by slide 
basis. Essentially, it screen captures each step and stitches it 
together with mouse movement. Then net result is what appears to be a 
video, but in fact is a series of static captures combined with mouse 
movement.

Camtasia works as if you are holding a video camera aimed at the screen. 
Everything is full motion. Presently, Captivate doesn't do well with 
full motion capture. Lots of room for improvement. Captivate does offer 
a panning and zooming, but it's horribly wimpy as compared to Camtasia's 
panning and zooming.

With both products you will be concerned about playback size. With 
Captivate, you need some serious thought about that size before you even 
begin recording. With Camtasia, the approach is vastly more forgiving. 
You generally are able to record at full screen, then produce at a 
smaller size and have good results. Largely, I believe, because of the 
special and proprietary TechSmith CODEC that is used.

The environment for editing Captivate is similar to PowerPoint. The 
environment for Camtasia is like a Non-Linear Editor such as Sony Vegas, 
Windows Moviemaker or Premiere. Complete timeline is at the bottom. 
Captivate has a timeline but what you see is on a "per slide" basis.

My general criteria is this. Want full motion with lots of panning and 
zooming? Camtasia is your tool. Want ability to capture and have 
annotations added for you and be able to easily create simulations? 
Captivate is your tool.

I'm sure others will offer advice. But that's what I have for now. Hope 
it helps!

Cheers... Rick :)

On 1/31/2012 8:03 AM, Cardimon, Craig wrote: