I’ve finally done it: Camtasia Studio
I never really intended to get into Camtasia Studio. I always thought that the price tag was too high for a screencasting program.
As many of you know, I’ve been using Camstudio for screen capture, Virtualdub for editing, Ffmpeg for video conversion, Audacity for audio capture, and so on.
The good thing about these tools is that they are free software. You can get the source code for each of them if you want it, and you can change it if you need to do so The bad thing about them is sometimes they don’t work as well as you would like them to work! Often it is the case with Camstudio that audio and video will fall out of step, for example. I only found out recently how to deal with this issue. Or if you are doing a long recording, it will often simply fail with Camstudio.
I’ve been getting to the stage where it is impractical for me to continue with this approach, so I decided to try the 30-day demo of Camtasia Studio. I started that 27 days ago.
This was like a breath of fresh air! Everything is integrated into the one package. Screen capture, video editing and video production is all handled.
No, it’s not perfect. But it saves so much time. And time is money; especially so in internet marketing, which is an ultra-competitive niche.
So I purchased my license key for it yesterday. I wasn’t really all that happy about having to shell out about £210 (£178 plus VAT I think it was), but I can no longer afford the time to mess around.
This is something I really should have done years ago. Maybe things would have been different if I had done it then.
Everybody makes mistakes, and “track corrections,” as a pilot would say, are part of the business. I am an advocate of free software, but I’m no Richard Stallman. If I need a tool for my business and it costs money, then I should realise that I need to buy it.
There’s a path that’s beaten by marketers far more successful than I. I will be paying more attention to that in the future.
23 February 2010, 18:25
Hi David,
I tried using Camstudio myself when I first started getting into video and I had so many problems with it that I finally got to the point where you are, it took too long to do anything of value so I got Camtasia and have never looked back. I am all for free tools and free software too but when it comes to valuing my time, sometimes there just is no substitute for a proven technology. Thanks!
[Reply]