Camtasia goes Mac

Posted by Gavin Brockis on Wednesday 09 September 2009 at 11:28am
Tags: e-learning | screen capture | vle |

Comments (2)

Since its first release in 2002 TechSmith's Camtasia Studio has become a favourite tool for screen capture in education. Whether recording Powerpoint presentations with voiceover, talking through software demonstrations or following an example workflow, Camtasia has offered users a fine set of capture, editing and compilation features for producing polished resources for teaching and learning. But only on Windows. Until now.

Now available for Intel Macs running OSX 10.5.6 and upwards, the new Camtasia for Mac provides multi-track video and audio compiling and editing, complete with transitions and simple effects, resizing and layering. These functions are combined with its trademark easy-to-use screen capture + audio, which can also take advantage of the iSight camera built into most new Macs to add a little 'live' video with minimal effort.

Screencasting on the Mac is far from a one horse race however, and while Mac users with experience of Camtasia Studio on the PC will no doubt welcome its debut on Mac (though they may miss one or two of the features currently missing from its more mature Windows counterpart), existing ScreenFlow users may take a little persuading - especially with the recent release of V2.0. The new OSX Snow Leopard system now also offers screen capture facilities within Quicktime X, and Adobe are in beta with Captivate for Mac. One thing is for sure, the competition in screen capture for Mac has suddenly got a lot hotter!

This is a quick test project which I recorded, edited, compiled and rendered entirely within Camtasia shortly after installing the full-featured 30 day evaluation version:

Camtasia for Mac - first impressions

Use this link if you would prefer to download the clip or if our video player is not showing

From my initial experiences making this little demo, I can already see this becoming a very popular tool within the team for creating parts of our training materials and online resources. Ease-of-use is excellent, and the interface feels familiarly 'Mac-like' and intuitive. Of course since this is V1.0 we will no doubt see further development to meet users' needs and feature requests, but for now this is a very welcome beginning, and feels well conceived and executed.

Comments (2)