i'm really liking the idea of this new 2 week review process.
anyway i would like to do the next review on Demo Movie Making programs.
(ie robodemo, macromedia captivate, turbodemo, bb flashback, qarbon viewletbuilder, wink, etc.
so, according to the plan we discussed, this monday i will post a skeleton review, and try to list all of the apps i can find that are up for contention for the award. please start posting now on this thread your thoughts and any other apps you think should be considered.
and especially post features that you think are important.
then we will have a week to debate which is best and talk about important features, etc.
i'm really looking forward to having that week to discuss the various merits of the different apps.
and a feature that is important to me that many programs do not handle all that well, proper screen capture synchronized to mouse: often i find that for example if you click a menu and then select an item on it, when you watch the movie the menu doesnt appear until you make the second click, which can be quite confusing.
another feature of important: size of result.
i've found it works better for me when i encode direct to xvid at a few fps instead of using the techsmith codec. anyone reviewing it might like to try the same if they find techsmith not too good.
The biggest problem with the Techsmith codec has always been making sure that people install it first. Lots of people seem to get very nervous when you ask them to install a codec.
good point markan. a codec or compression format is not very useful if other people can't decode it.
i think video programs like camtasia definitely need to be talked about in the review, but this review will probably focus mainly on programs specifically designed to create high-resolution low-bandwidth screen demo movies, in a format like flash, as opposed to full-video solutions (which are either high-bandwidth or lo-res).
these two approaches are very different. it will be useful to talk about both, but my intention is to focus on the former, which is more suitable for demoing software (imho).
mouser, you might love BB Flashback then. I really wanted to buy Macromedia when I spent time looking for these, but after a week of testing, found that it skipped on as many as half of the demos I recorded — and I have 4Gb of RAM on my system! With BB Flashback, one can import as well as capture any sound being played on one's system during recording. I even made a video of a music video just to see how far it would go! Best of all, though, you can record your movements, and then go back and record and edit your audio track until it's exactly how you want it. I could go on, but for the price, it's really, really good.
I've used it twice in support situations by linking to a html/flash file I uploaded, and got my problems fixed in no time when a tech could see exactly how their app was behaving in a given situation. I thought of putting a number of demo videos of some of the apps on my site instead of just screenshots, but it would eat up far too much bandwidth. One other useful application of this type of software is between languages. I worked with an Austrian author who spoke almost no English, but was able to point out several flaws in one menu's features and two dialogs that was clear from the video without translating 400 words or more for describing my actions.
alex sent me a bug report in screenshot captor by making a wink movie demonstrating the problem.
really helped immensely.. i wonder if this might not be the future of bug reports..
let's be sure to talk about this in the review.
Just a corrective note. You mention: "Camtasia is unlike the other ScreenCasting tools in this review, because it produces pure movie files using video formats that are meant to be played back in a standard movie player like windows media player."
BB Flashback, too, exports to AVI and WMV (exe, PowerPoint, and Flash).
yes you're right, in fact almost all of these tools can optionally produce pure traditional video files.
i was really trying to indicate that the primary output of camtasia is a video file, wheras the other tools are really meant for flash output primarily.
camtasia really needs to be looked at closely by me, i was surprised at the editing controls and annotation support that i hadn't expected.
I don't know diddly about the programs themselves but as a user of what they produce (and that's just as important) robodemo has stood out enough among the ones I've watched for me to notice. (Used to love robohelp too when I had to write the stuff).
taking a cue from Veign here in this post..
I just tried out Techsmith's Jing Project - Just one word - S U P E R B!
the advantage of hosting the finished file without having to worry about file size etc.
It is available for both Windows and Macs.