Video Review – Camtasia For Mac

1 Minute Read
7 comments
V

Earlier this week, TechSmith released Camtasia for Mac.

This is the first serious challenge for ScreenFlow, which has long been regarded as the best choice for making screen recordings on a Mac.

So how does Camtasia for Mac stack up?  Is it better than ScreenFlow…is it worse…and which of these two competing titles should you use?

I answer all of these questions and more in a video I’ve put together demonstrating the features of Camtasia for Mac.

Click on the image below to watch the video now (if you’re a Firefox user, you’ll need to be using Firefox 3.0 or above to watch this video):

Camtasia For Mac

7 comments

  • This looks better than the PC version and it’s a lot cheaper! Why is that?

    Does the Mac Camtasia version do that cool thing where you can put the video at an angle?

  • I bought camtasia for mac after using screenflow for a while, but was dissapointed that camtasia does not have flv export as it does on windows. FLV was the standard before so most people could view it – Is the swf container way of embedding in a web page sufficient now?

  • @Pete – Camtasia for Mac doesn’t have as many options as the PC version…plus…they are late to the Mac party, where ScreenFlow ($99) already has a large user base.

  • @Chris – Camtasia 6 on the PC does MP4 or FLV (it started out doing just MP4).

    FLV is an older format, while MP4 (which uses the H.264 codec) is where all video on the web is going.

    As long as viewers have updated their version of Flash in the past year or so, they can watch MP4 (H.264) videos just as easily as Flash.

    You can also simply rename the files produced by either ScreenFlow or Camtasia from “myvideo.mov” or “myvideo.mp4” to “myvideo.flv” and they will play as FLV files just fine (this is because of the H.264 codec).

    For example, my video review of Camtasia was produced in ScreenFlow and exported as a QuickTime movie. Then I just renamed the file extension to .FLV and embedded it like any other Flash video.

  • So I just tried Camtasia due to all the hype it’s been getting.

    If you record anything that has any motion in it, Camtasia cannot keep up. I get 5-7 fps when recording lots of motion (say, a Keynote presentation or a Movie). ScreenFlow has no problems keeping 30fps on my machine at full screen resolution.

    For that reason alone, I’m staying with ScreenFlow. Personally, I do keynote presentations, and I need to see the nice transitions and effects. Camtasia simply cannot hang.

    I also noticed the file sizes are huge (relative to ScreenFlow), and Camtasia seems to really put the hurt on my CPU relative to ScreenFlow.

    Dave

You Might Also Like...