Why use Camtasia?

- Camtasia is first and foremost, a great application for recording, editing, and sharing screen-based movies, commonly called screencasts. But by creating a great tool for screencasting, TechSmith has also produced an extremely powerful, yet easy to use tool for effective communication, using audio, video, and motion graphics. Now, Camtasia is really two separate, but interconnected apps, the media recorder and the media editor. Now, the Camtasia recorder can be used to record your computer screen, your microphone, your webcam, and capture your computer's audio. Now, the Camtasia editor is used to refine and enhance your story, then share it with the world. Now, we're going to spend a lot of time in this course, going through the essential features of the editor, so that you can tell your story to the best of your ability. Now, the normal Camtasia workflow is to use the recorder to capture your story, then use the editor to refine it, by removing mistakes, adding emphasis, and incorporating additional media that you create on your computer or capture on your mobile devices. Then you'll share your finished work with the world. At the end of this chapter, we're going to look at a few other workflows in more detail. Now, the obvious use for Camtasia is to produce instructional screencasts for your class, your business, or for your growing following on social media. But you could also use Camtasia to record quick video notes to yourself or to others, record and edit live events that take place on Zoom, FaceTime, or Skype, create embedded videos for a presentation, practice walking through your presentation, grading student work by narrating feedback to a learner, create the next animated GIF that goes viral on the internet, or documenting that new application that you've been developing. Now, in my own daily work, I use Camtasia primarily for two things, for creating polished video-based training and for making quick video notes for myself and for others. Now, after watching the rest of this course and learning all of the essentials of using Camtasia, tweet me a note @csmattia with your ideas for how you're using Camtasia. I'd love to see and hear what you are creating.