Unveiled at Comdex in 1999, Camtasia is a video capture and production tool developed by the TechSmith Corporation, based on feedback from SnagIt users, a popular screen capture program for Windows. Also included with Camtasia is DubItTM, an audio editor for laying audio tracks onto your videos. To download and view Camtasia Demos and Tutorials, visit their Examples page.

Camtasia itself is actually made up of two programs, the Camtasia Recorder to record Windows desktop activity into video and Camtasia Producer, a non-linear editor used to create streaming formats and AVI files. Together, these applications allow you to create precise copies of screen activity and to save those videos into highly compressed files. This level of compression is based on the TechSmith Screen Capture Codec (TSCC), optimized for recording computer screens.

Features of Camtasia include the ability to show cursor movement, highlighting, zooming and panning. You can choose fonts, colors, size and the appearance necessary to enhance video quality. You can easily toggle effects on and off and you can preview your changes before proceeding with making a movie.

The Camtasia Producer is useful when working with long productions composed of multiple video clips. It uses a wizard, which leads you through the steps in creating a movie from your components that exist in your storyboard. The wizard offers customization options such as color depth, frame size, compression, watermarking and copyright information.

The Camtasia Producer uses a storyboard metaphor to join AVI files. Other features include: splitting/trimming/splitting AVI clips, AVI format conversion (e.g. frame rate, color depth, codecs), audio compression, smooth scaling (interpolation), 78 transition effects and copyright/title/author support.

File formats include Project Files, AVI, animated GIF, Microsoft Advanced Streaming Format (ASF*), Microsoft Windows Media Video (WMV) format, Apple QuickTime video (MOV), RealNetworks RealMedia (RM) format or Camtasia RealPlayer Plugin (CAMV). When using AVI’s, the Camtasia Producer defaults to the TechSmith codec, though you can choose any of the other format.

*Note: When using ASF, you need to download the appropriate files. Visit the Downloads page for the link.

The TSCC is designed to provide lossless image quality and excellent compression ratios, even when working with multiple compression/decompression cycles. Since smooth video requires high frame rates, the codec affects the capture rate and speed of compression. The TSCC offers quality compression speed at all color depths, unlike the Microsoft RLE codec which is lossless but only offers 8-bit color.

The Camtasia Pack and Show feature converts Camtasia movies into an executable file that allows users to install the TechSmith codec, allowing them to view the movie. Videos encoded with the TSCC can be played with any standard media player.

Camtasia System Requirements To run Camtasia, you need a 90 MHz processor (400 or better recommended), with 16 MB RAM (64 MB recommended), a Windows compatible sound card and microphone, 12 MB of hard disk space and running Microsoft Windows 95/98/Me/NT 4.0/2000/XP. For output from Camtasia Producer, you also need to install Windows Media Tools for Advanced Streaming Format (ASF) files, Windows Media Encoder version 7 or later and QuickTime for Windows version 4.1 or later.