Camtasia, Captivate, and other commercial or freebies

[Daniel Ng]

Well I had to make that same choice once. I think Camtasia gives a more
realistic, human feel to the software since you are recording subtle
mouse motions as is, into a video file. 
Yes a bit of audacity tomfoolery is required, but so far I haven't
required the need for that.

Captivate is, probably pretty convenient for short mouse simulations
since it automates mouse clicks and captioning, and even writing the
steps for you if required. I find it however a little too tedius to view
for my liking usually, where every mouse movement is paused and
described.
However the output from captivate is probably much smaller since it is
in editable flash.

Just make sure that your software doesn't have a lot of drag and drop
motions, with that sort of complex motions, since all motions are
reprocessed into flash motion tweens, or avi for drag and drop.

cheers


-----Original Message-----
From: Rob Hudson [mailto:caveatrob at gmail.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, September 04, 2007 6:50 AM
To: TECHWR-L
Subject: Camtasia, Captivate, and other commercial or freebies

Hi all,

A few months ago I inquired about the tool of choice for tech writers to
create presentations that demonstrate software functionality. I received
quite a few responses that were split between Captivate and Camtasia.

I'm wondering what today's tool of choice is for producing short five to
ten-minute tutorials on using software packages. I'm documenting a
web-based system and am trying to decide between Captivate and Camtasia.
The boss has a pretty strong inclination towards Captivate and I don't
know whether to switch to that in its current version or stay with
Techsmith's tools.

Any opinions based on current versions of either? As I recall, Camtasia
used to have trouble mixing more than two audio tracks without Audacity
tomfoolery.

Thanks,

Rob

--
Rob Hudson
PhD Student, Technical Comm. and Rhetoric Composition Assessment
Software Developer Texas Tech University www.iteachwriting.com