Over the years, TechSmith’s Camtasia has evolved from being the go-to program for software demonstrators to a full-featured education/information video tool. With version 8, Camtasia Studio ($299, 30-day free trial) has not only added new features—including multi-track video editing and embedded hyperlinks—but has been rewritten from the ground up with new optimized code and greater potential impact.

If you watch a YouTube video explaining how to edit in Photoshop, write in Word, or do anything else in a program, that video was very likely created with Camtasia Record, the original core function of Camtasia Studio. Capturing and showing screen-based activity, such as cursor movement, menu choices, and other interface interactions remains quite straightforward. Click the Record button, and everything you do on your computer monitor is recorded, until you click the Stop button. The results are quite smooth, even when capturing complex on-screen media. That’s because Camtasia’s new capture engine is optimized for high-definition video, and can now record at 30 frames per second. (Version 7 had a tendency to slow down to 5-10 frames per second.)

But once you get into the video editor, Version 8 is clearly an entirely new kind of program. The new multi-track interface can import video from other sources, including  MP4, MPG, MPEG, WMV, MOV, SWF, BMP, GIF, JPG, PNG, WAV, MP3, WMA and Zipped Library. (However, Camtasia Studio imports only one video and one audio track from a .mov file, rather than multiple tracks. Also, only SWF created from Jing or previous versions of Camtasia Studio can be imported.). You can even display several video windows in a single screen and have them play at the same time. You can name and group tracks. What’s more, batch edits such as animations, zoom/pan, and other effects can be applied to an entire group, saving lots of time and effort.

The Canvas is no longer just a playback view of your project. You can now work directly with any object (including video windows) on the Canvas, clicking and dragging to resize and reposition. When dragging, alignment guides appear to help you line up elements to other objects. However, there’s no single-click command to resize a window that fills the canvas, which would be useful. Anything (video windows, graphics, callouts, etc.) on the canvas can be animated over time. In our tests, we were able to create some very slick visuals, such as applying a perspective angle to a video window, using the rotation control. Unfortunately, you can’t apply rotation with interactive clicks and drags, only through a dialog.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here