4D screenshots!

As part of putting together a document about the courses I have been teaching, I decided I wanted to be able to share some screen capture video. I’ve done next to nothing with that sort of software, so I solicited recommendations and two people pointed me in the direction of Camtasia Studio. They have a 30 day demo version which, from the little that I tried, seems to give you access to a fairly complete version. I didn’t use the audio or webcam functions, but it looks like it would be really easy to combine annotation from one of those sources over a screen capture video. The screen captures themselves looked really good – mine are only a bit jerky and it looked like I could have tweaked the settings to make them even smoother if I hadn’t minded the file sizes growing even more. I’ve also done very little video editing in the past, but the built in tools, whle probably not as sophisticated as some of the stuff out there, seemed to be fairly robust. I really only scratched the surface with the software because I had a very targeted task I was trying to accomplish, but if you have any reason to want to create a video demo of something on your computer, particularly with commentary, I’d definitely recommend trying this software out.