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Jimco Software Reviews - Camtasia Studio 3.0 (continued)
A Sweet Suite
Camtasia Studio is actually a suite of products. Included are the following products:
- Camtasia Audio Editor - A rudimentary audio editor.
- Camtasia MenuMaker - A powerful, template-based menu creation tool.
- Camtasia Player - A Windows-based multimedia player for Camtasia presentations.
- Camtasia Recorder - Used to record the screen in Windows.
- Camtasia Theater - A Flash-based menu creation tool for creating DVD-like menus.
- Camtasia Studio - Powerful presentation creation software with full editing capabilities.
All of these tools are available from the Start menu or from the Tools menu inside of Camtasia Studio.
How It Works
Camtasia works by recording the screen as you work in realtime. It can record audio as well either while you are recording the screen or afterwards. As you are recording the screen, you have the option of highlighting mouse clicks and motion, etc. Once you have recorded your presentation, Camtasia Recorder saves it as an AVI file. You can then import that AVI file into Camtasia Studio (see figure 1) for editing.
Figure 1 - Camtasia Studio
Editing consists of adding narration, transitions, callouts, and more. You can also zoom and pan around the screen so that certain portions of the screen are highlighted. In addition to these rudimentary tasks, you can also create interactive quizes using Camtasia Studio so that you can test a user's comprehension when you're doing online training.
Configuring zooms, pans, and callouts is quick and painless (see figure 2), but version 3.0 has removed the ability to nudge callouts using the keyboard arrow keys. TechSmith tells me that they will bring back that functionality in a future patch.
Update: The October patch for Camtasia does add the ability to nudge callouts.
Figure 2 - Configuring a Callout
Picture in Picture
New to version 3.0 is the Picture in Picture feature. This allows you to record yourself via a webcam as you view your presentation. You can then display a video of yourself in a PiP (picture in picture) and move it or resize it as needed. This is a great new feature and one that you'll want to take advantage of if you are doing training with Camtasia.
 [Picture in Picture] is a great new feature and one that you'll want to take advantage of if you are doing training with Camtasia.
Camtasia's PiP feature allows you to see a preview of the camera recording as you record. This is a useful feature that helps you to ensure that the final result is what you expect.
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