Camtasia ( formerly known as Camtasia Studio) is a software suite, created and published by TechSmith, for creating and recording video tutorials and presentations directly via screencast, or via a direct recording plug-in to Microsoft PowerPoint. Audio or other multimedia recordings may be recorded at the same time or added separately from another source.
Camtasia consists of two major components:
Camtasia Recorder - a separate tool for capturing screen audio and video
Camtasia Video Editor - the component for which the entire product is named, which is now a multimedia authoring tool with a "timeline" interface for managing multiple clips in a stacked track form.
In Camtasia Recorder, users can start and stop recording with a hotkey combination at any time, at which point the recording can be halted and Camtasia Recorder can render the input that has been captured into a CAMREC format. The CAMREC file can be saved to disk or directly imported into the Camtasia component for editing. Camtasia Recorder allows audio recording while screen-capturing is in progress, so the presenter can capture live narration during a demonstration or presentation. Camtasia also supports dubbing in other audio tracks or voiceover during post-capture editing. Users may also download an add-in for Microsoft Power Point that will allow them to initiate recording of a presentation from within Power Point itself.
In Camtasia Video Editor, multimedia objects of various formats can be imported into the clip library and arrange them in time order and stacked tracks using the timeline form of user controls. Overlays of various types may be added, including user-defined settings, such as when and how to display the cursor and pan-and-zoom effects such as the Ken Burns effect.
After capturing a presentation in the Camtasia Recorder, the Camtasia component can be used to modify audio and video displayed as tracks by using the timeline control and object library interface with an integrated preview window. The image in the infobox to the right is a screen capture of the timeline interface. In addition, Camtasia allows automatic captions (speech-to-text), voice overlay for the presenter or editor, as well as the ability to add sound effects in various formats.
The Camtasia program allows import of various types of multimedia video and audio files including MP4, MP3, WMV, WMA, AVI, WAV and other formats into the Camtasia proprietary CAMREC format, which is readable by Camtasia. The CAMREC format is a single container for various multimedia objects including video clips, still images, document screen shots and special effect containers. The created video can be exported to common video formats including MPEG-2, MPEG-4, WMV, AVI, and Adobe Flash.
