Camtasia 8.4 and Snagit 12 – New Features You’ll Love

As you know, Lon and I like to be the first to tell you when there are updates to our favorite tools that make them easier to use and provide more functionality. So, I’m really excited to let you know about an update (one free and one paid) to Camtasia Studio and Snagit- both created by TechSmith.

Let’s start with Camtasia Studio 8.4. 

If you already have Camtasia, this is a free upgrade. Simply go to the Help Menu item and choose “Check for Updates”. Now, as of this morning (the 24th) it was saying that 8.3 was the latest version and I believe that is because they needed an extra few days to repair a bug in 8.4. Soooooo, give it a couple more days then check for it again.

Lon did a nice overview of the new features in our Screencast Video Coaching session this past Tuesay night and you can watch that 7 minute video below, but a few of the highlights are:

• Mac users will like the fact that now the recordings work cross platform which means that they will open on both the PC and the Mac for editing.
• You can now turn off tracks so you can edit the other tracks more easily and not even hear the audio on the track you turned off.
• The player now supports a faster or slower playback.  This will be great for those who, like me, run their life in speed mode and want their videos to go fast, fast, fast!

So take a look at Lon lays it all out for you…

If you don’t have Camtasia yet and you are ready to purchase, I would be just so grateful if you would purchase through my reseller site at http://GetCamtasia.com.  You will be blown away by all the bonuses you get when you buy through me.

Now on to Snagit 12

I’m going to skip a lot of the features that are mainly for people who use Snagit to create documentation. Since our audience is mainly comprised of video folks, I’m just going to highlight the video related features I will use.

First of all, you can now do simple video editing.  This is huge. For people who want to record their webinars and just cut out the beginning part and a few “ums” and “you knows” along the way, you should be thrilled with this version.  And there are lots of other videos you can create (such as simple tutorials) that only require simple editing.  There is no restriction on the length of the video either. So many other free tools only allow 5 minutes of recording (and NO editing at all).

Also, once you are finished, you can send it pretty much anywhere on the web with one click. This makes things so easy.

And lastly, I use the stamps built in (plus the stamps I can download from the TechSmith site) in my Camtasia videos as “Callouts”. They can give it a completely different look from the callouts that are in the software already. Just open a stamp and then choose “share to Camtasia Studio” and it will put it right into the clip bin. OMG – love that!

Here’s a quick video showing you everything I have mentioned.

I think Snagit 12 makes a nice addition to your Screencaster Toolkit and for those of you who are just getting into screencast video and don’t want to spend the money on Camtasia yet, consider making this $49 investment, create a few videos and see if this tool has what you need.

Thanks for watching!