Camtasia for Mac – Pro Screencasting

There’s always been a small handful of Screen Recording applications available for the Mac, but now there’s a new kid on the block! TechSmith’s Camtasia Studio for Windows has been around for the past few years, and has grown to become the standard for professional screencasting over on Windows platform. Now Camtasia recently released the Mac version of this software, which is packed with handy little features, a simple, refined user interface and built-in editing functions, allowing you to create fantastic screencasts.

When you open Camtasia, you’ll be greeted with it’s relatively simple user interface. From here, you’ll be able to choose to record your microphone input, iSight Camera and system sounds, when you’re ready to start – just hit the record button. Camtasia then starts recording, if at any time you want to finish your recording, you can do so from Camtasia’s menu bar icon, or by using a simple key combination.

Once you’ve finished your recording, the Camtasia Editing Window will open, allowing you to add video effects, transitions and video overlays. From looking at their website, the editing interface is very similar to it’s Windows counterpart and to ScreenFlow’s editing window.The editing window is split into three main areas, the timeline (at the bottom of the window), the video Canvas and the Media/Library pane at the right. The Media pane stores your imported video and the Library pane contains a handful of video overlays including speech bubbles and text which can be added to your video.

Underneath the Media/Library Pane are three toggle buttons, which can be selected to display the other video and audio effects available in Camtastia. Camtasia includes lots of video Transitions, Filters and Actions that can be added to your screencast.

One of my favourite video actions is Camtasia is Smart Focus, especially Smart Focus at Time. Basically, Camtasia analyses your video and zooms in and out the video appropriately to the main window size, and the mouse clicks performed in the video. It only takes a few seconds and worked really well. Naturally, some parts did need changing a little, but all-in-all, it’s a very handy and time saving feature to have.

By using Camtasia’s built in editing functions, in theory, it means that you shouldn’t have to use an external movie editing application such as iMovie or Final Cut – and it’s true. Having built in editing functions saves a lot of time, and means you’re not having to export and import your video into other applications.

It’s also a snap to export and share your screencast with the world, by uploading it to YouTube, Screencast.com or iTunes. It would be nice to have some video size/quality options built-in to the YouTube Export, but the iTunes and Screencast.com sharing options work a treat.

If however you’d like to delve a little deeper and change some of the advanced options you can do that too via the Advanced Export option.

Altogether, Screencast a solid, easy to use screencasting application, however, that doesn’t mean there is no room for improvement. Between this version and it’s Windows counterpart, there’s a few features missing that I’d love to see – you can check out the comparison chart to see some of the features that didn’t make it into the Mac version.

Camtasia is available on the TechSmith website for the introductory price of $99, which increases to $149 at the end of this year. You’ll need to be running Mac OSX 10.5.6 or later and have a Mac that has Quartz Extreme support. You’ll also need 1GB of Ram and 4GB’s of free storage space.

Camtasia also has some competition too – in the way of Telestream’s ScreenFlow. At this moment in time, it’s really difficult to decide which application offers the best features and ease of use at the same price. However, TechSmith will need to add a lot more features, including those that are missing to justify the $149 price tag.

I’d recommend Camtasia for Mac to anyone, you can purchase Camtasia from the TechSmith website, where you’ll also be able to download a free 30 day trial. I’d also recommend taking a look at some of the introduction and walk-through videos that are available on the TechSmith website too.