Screencasting Tools Review - Camtasia Studio vs Adobe Captivate

Let's begin at the very beginning. I've always been a loyal Adobe Captivate user. I started using Captivate when it was called RoboDemo and owned by another company called eHelp. At the time, I was actively looking for a screencasting tool to invest in. I tried various different ones including ViewletBuilder, TurboDemo and Camtasia.

I chose RoboDemo because it had a great set of features at a reasonable price. Camtasia was at that time a bit too complicated for me, with it's special codec etc. But Camtasia has gone a long way and with the recent release of Camtasia Studio 4.0 I've come to point where I have to decide whether to upgrade to the latest Captivate 2.0 or switch to Camtasia Studio 4.0 (which cost the same).

Just keep in mind that this review is going to be from my own personal experiences and needs.

Recording

The first thing I noticed about Camtasia is how easily it records the screen. It does it so seemlessly. I hardly noticed that it was in the background, recording my every move. Stopping the recording was just as easy. Just click on the "Stop" button and that's it, recording done. You then have a choice to preview what you've just recorded. If you're happy with it, you can save it. If not, just delete it and start a new recording.

The main difference between Camtasia and Captivate when it comes to recording is what it records.

With Camtasia, everything on your screen (within your selected area, that is) is recorded. Recording is done in real time. So, if you were to pause for awhile to think, the pause would be recorded as well. But this can be easily edited later on. Even your mistakes are recorded. You can always pause the recording, but if you had to do other things on your computer during the pause, continuing with the recording may not sync perfectly.

Captivate, on the other hand, only takes screen captures as your screen changes. So, if I had to pause and think for awhile, Captivate won't capture anything. And when you're done, just click on 'stop' and Captivate will compile all the different screen captures into a project. So, instead of the one video file that Camtasia comes up with, Captivate will display each screen capture as a slide.

So, recording with Captivate and displaying the different slides (which can come up to 100s) can take quite a bit of time and processing power.

Editing

Maybe I'm just so used to Captivate, but I find editing the screen recording a bit difficult with Camtasia, especially if I've made a mistake somewhere in the recording. The thing with Captivate is that the mouse is captured separately to the screen itself. So, when editing, I can actually move the mouse to where I want it to be. I can even change how the mouse looks like. So, if I've clicked on the wrong button in a screen recording, for example, all I have to do is just move the mouse to the right button and create a clicking sound. And the mistake of clicking the wrong button would cease to exist.

Editing a section out of a Camtasia is quite easy too. Just select where you want the cut out to start and drag to where you want it to stop and click on the scissors icon and that's it, selection gone. Unfortunately, along with it goes the mouse movements. So, depending on the section you cut out, your viewers may see the mouse at one spot one second and the end of the screen in another. This may get a bit confusing if you did extensive editing.

Plus, if I were to click on the wrong button in the recording, I would have to re-record clicking on the right button. And pasting this new recording between two points in the timeline will not be seemless.

Another thing I noticed is to get a good 'cut out', you need to keep a close eye on the timeline as the movie plays, so you know exactly which part to select. Sometimes you need to watch the movie more than once, to be certain. With Captivate, you just delete the slide that you don't want and since the mouse movements is separate from the slide itself, the movement will remain seemless.

Adding captions was much easier in Captivate. And several features that were available in Captivate are not included or more simplistic in Camtasia, for example, adding and editing a highlight box, adding a click box, text entry box. But I guess, this is all only important if you want to create simulations and training as opposed to just demos.

The highlight feature in Captivate, for example, gives you a choice of whether you'd like to highlight your selection or the outer area of your selection (giving you a grayed out effect). With respect to Camtasia's hotspot callout feature, it's a much more basic and simplistic version of Captivate's click box. Having said that, just like adding captions, adding the highlight and hotspot callouts into your presentation requires more effort in Camtasia than it would with Captivate.

Output format

This is where I think Camtasia has an upperhand over Captivate. Camtasia can produce your movie in several formats, including H.264, Windows Media, AVI, SWF, and FLV. Some of the formats mentioned supports streaming which is useful if you have a long movie. And the video formats makes it easy for you to upload your movies to online video hosts such as, GoogleVideo.

Captivate, on the other hand, will only output the movie into a Flash animation (SWF) which does not support streaming. But then again, Captivate allows you to output your slides into Microsoft Word format, which is useful if you want to make handouts of your demo available.

Conclusion

Well, all in all, I would have to say that I prefer Captivate. Mainly because it has features that meet my specific needs. I can , however, understand why Camtasia is so popular within the internet marketing community. It is a good software and to some extent more intuitive. And if you don't mind sharing some of your small mistakes with your viewers as you go along, Camtasia is much easier and more efficient to use.

But if you're like me, and you need to create simulations and training and you need to have precise control over everything on the screen then, you'd probably want to give Captivate a go.

Having said all that, you have to keep in mind that I already have a copy of Captivate. All I need to do is upgrade to the latest version which cost the same as buying a new copy Camtasia. A brand new Captivate is $599. That, in itself, is enough to put many of us off - even myself. But for now, looks like I'll stick to Captivate.