The Screen Recording Experiement

nicole

Jul 13, 2014

After a recent conversation with my buddy Jason, I decided to record a video to give him a quick refresher on how to update his site. In the past I’ve used Jing but I wanted something that did not have a time limit and had a bit more functionality. So, I decided this was a fine time to try out Camtasia for Mac. I thought it might be fun to blog about my experience as I tried out the product to make my first Camtasia video. I will admit I don’t like to read tutorials. I firmly believe that software should be intuitive enough to complete your primary objective without the need of a dense help section.

7:47 pm: Head over to the TechSmith website and download the file
7:55 pm: 180MB file finishes downloading
8:15 pm: Had to uninstall some incompatible QuickTime components which required a restart.
8:30 pm: Noticed the Start and Stop recording icon in the task bar. Nice.
9:00 pm: Got my screen set up, did a quick dry run recording and realized that I did not like the way I sounded. Ditched the recording and started a new one with no sound.
9:30 pm: Happy with the screen recording but had a hell of a time figuring out that you had to drag the elements from the effects pane to make them appear on the canvas. Thinking maybe I should have considered watching a tutorial but decided against it.
9:45 pm: I see, you have to drag the inner box on an annotation to make it expand in one direction. I would rather just have to drag the outside edge of the main box.
10:00 pm: I am exporting my first movie with 14 captions that fade in and out. Not bad for my first time around.

Overall verdict: Pretty good! I think once I get a better set up for recordings I can see myself using this quite a bit for the training videos I send to clients. It will be well worth the $99 investment. Of course I had to share my first quick and dirty Camtasia Video. 100% likely to be boring to anyone else except myself and Jason, but thought I should at least share for those that were curious.