Camtasia Studio 6 screen video capture

Camtasia Studio 6 is the latest version of Techsmith’s desktop screen capture application.

Aimed at those who need to produce polished, professional presentations such as application training materials, there are two elements to the package: a screen capture recording application and an editor.

There’s not much to say about the first, other than it’s supremely easy to use and can be configured for different screen sizes and capture areas.

The editor is comparable with a fully fledged video-editing application, with features for editing on-screen action.

Possibly the most useful of these is a tracking feature that automatically zooms in on the cursor to provide close-up shots of important actions such as menu selections and button clicks.

This new release adds a number of new video output formats including H.264, which replaces .flv in the Blog and Web output presets. Youtube and HD display options are also included, alongside an option to generate and upload videos to Techsmith’s Screencast.com video sharing site.

The program has good audio features; you can record audio commentary during live capture or later, and insert duplicate video frames to keep the action in sync if your words run over time. This version permits decoupling of the audio and video timelines to provide further editing flexibility and a new 3D tilt effect rotates and skews the screen.

The productivity enhancements, along with the new MPEG4-based output options, make this a strong upgrade candidate. In the absence of competitors, other than the more expensive Adobe Captivate, or a slew of lesser shareware programs, it should also attract plenty of new users. It’s a shame that the price puts it out of reach for all but professional users.