Camtasia Studio 

This is a useful software for creating videos for courses that can be delivered online or through a CD. For instance, if you want to create a tutorial for some software application, then you can create a video that demonstrates how specific tasks are performed. The software has five applications–Camtasia recorder, Producer, Effects, MenuMaker and Player. It let’s you capture actions happening on your desktop such as cursor movement, and pop up windows, and then save them as a video or go for live broadcasting. You can use any streaming media encoder for this, such as Windows Media Encoder or Real Producer. 

The Camtasia recorder records videos in AVI format only, but using Camtasia Producer, they can be converted to other formats such as Flash, RM, MOV, WMA, animated GIF and EXE. You can compress AVI files using video codecs. It uses one TSCC video codec by default, but you can also choose your own. But then you’ll need the same codec installed if you want to view the video on another machine. Camtasia Effects can be used to put special effects in your videos such as editable callouts– text you type below a particular action to explain what’s going on–, text and images. You can set time for each step you’ve recorded. For instance, if you click a file name and a window pops up, then you can set the duration for which that window will remain on screen. You can add multiple video clips in a single movie and cut unwanted scenes from any clip. 

Camtasia makes your work a front-end, so it becomes easily accessible. It also includes a movie player called Camtasia player, which can play only AVI movies. 

Sukhsagar Prajapati