Techsmith's Camtasia, SnagIt and DubIt

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Techsmith has really outdone themselves! This review is going to cover three of their products, SnagIt, Camtasia and DubIt that are absolutely terrific! The first of these products is SnagIt.

SnagIt is a screen capture utility that is so easy to use I have finally decided I need to switch from my old stand by to using SnagIt.

What can you capture with SnagIt? You can capture images, text, video and even gather images from web sites. SnagIt has a Catalog that is a "Capture Viewer" where you can keep all your captures and browse through them.

Forgot about copy and paste when you want to capture text. SnagIt captures text as text and saves it to a text file, not an image!

The main interface of SnagIt is straight forward and extremely easy to use. Setting up SnagIt to capture what you want, where you want and how you want is unbelievably simple. To get set up you choose how you want to capture. With SnagIt you have many, many choices as the screen shots below will show you.

The next thing to set up is what you want to happen to your captures once captured. You can set this from the Output menu. 

Check out all the options you have in the Filters menu.

With SnagIt studio you can enhance your screen captures and add many different types of objects to them.

Below is a capture of the above sentence, captured as an image, opened in SnagIt Studio. I then was able to add the clip art to the capture. You can add stamps, shapes, pointers, clip art, callouts, arrows or even edit the image yourself with lines, shapes, text and more. SnagIt Studio is an image editing tool and a perfect compliment to SnagIt.

What did I forget in the sentence captured above...only that it's extremely easy.

Now, if all that isn't fun enough here is some more really exciting stuff. When I'm not working here at the magazine, I'm writing tutorials for my own web site. I've always wanted something that I could automate this process with and show actively the steps needed to complete a process instead of just using screen shots. Screen shots are great but actually showing is a whole new ball game.

This is where the Camtasia recorder and producer come in. I am beside myself with what these tools can do and we still haven't talked about DubIt yet! Below is the Camtasia Recorder interface. Really simple yet very powerful.

You have options that you can set for your capture. Below are screen shots of the Camtasia Producer menus.

On the right are some of the effects you can add to your Camtasia movie.

I can't explain as succinctly what Camtasia Producer as the help file included with Camtasia Producer.

"...Develop videos that introduce new software, train new users of existing software, or create any kind of active documentation. Distribute the videos as standard AVI files or as streaming presentations or animated GIF files from a website.
You can use Camtasia Producer to edit your videos in the creation of training videos, multimedia projects, and demonstrations of all types. The standard Windows Media Player, RealNetworks RealPlayer, or any AVI player (such as TechSmiths Camtasia Player) can be used to view the captured files. You can also add effects, transitions between scenes, annotations, and watermarks to your movies.

Copyright 2000, 2001 TechSmith Corporation..."

Yes, it does all that and more.

Below is a gif image created by first capturing with Camtasia Recorder and then converting to gif with Camtasia Producer. It's a simple animation showing how to open a new file in Paint Shop Pro. It's approxiametely 60Kb.

Below is the DubIt interface. This is where you add sound to your images and movies. There is a link after this screen shot to a Windows Media file (.wmv) so that you can see and hear my first attempt at producing an introductory tutorial. The Windows Media file is around 1,890 KB, and runs for about 2.5 minutes. I've got some background music and voice in the movie. You'll see I'm not the greatest speaker on earth but you'll get the idea behind the power of Techsmith's products. The link will open the Windows Media Player and you must have that to view the movie.

Ever wanted to add sound to a static image? Well you can with DubIt. Of course it won't be a gif or jpg when you finish adding sound but it can be an avi, wmv or rm file. Sometimes, even though a single picture can be worth a thousand words, a single picture with a simple voice over can be worth so much more!

You can read more about these products at the following links:

Camtasia