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.