Description Camtasia gives you all the tools you need to create engaging, high-quality videos with ease. Whether you need to put together an eye-catching training, presentation, or demo video, Camtasia makes it easy to communicate your message visually, add professional polish, and capture onscreen activity.*Communicate Your Message Visually*Share high-quality, HD videos that your viewers can watch anytime, on nearly any device.
It remains to be seen how useful this will be once I’m fully up and running with Final Cut Pro X. But worth keeping an eye on for things Camtasia might do that Final Cut Pro doesn’t do. Also of note, TechSmith who sells this, also owns Screencast.com which combined with Camtasia is a direct competitor to Screencast-o-matic.
Here’s something about MP4 standard replacing Flash files, notable for iPad which doesn’t support Flash.
This from the TechSmith Camtasia site.
Why You Should Use the MP4 File Format Instead of FLV
For many years, the preferred file format for sharing video online (whether through a hosting service or on your own website) has been Adobe’s Flash Video format, or FLV. This was once the default video file type for Camtasia Studio productions. In Camtasia Studio 6, the default file format for video production was changed to MPEG-4 (or MP4). Why the change?
Video technology never stops evolving, and Camtasia Studio changes as well to continue to offer the best production options to our customers and their viewers. FLV became a popular choice for video on the Internet due to the ubiquity of the Adobe Flash plug-in, but advances in browser technology and the Flash plug-in itself mean that more traditional video file formats are now commonplace. FLV files themselves are rarely served up by video hosting services anymore. Instead, MP4 has taken its place (often with a Flash controller playing the MP4 file) as the new standard for video on the Web. Other pages use HTML 5 to directly play the MP4 video file.
MP4 is a great way to provide high quality videos along with compression that gives great file size. Specifically, Camtasia Studio (and its Mac OS X counterpart, Camtasia for Mac) create MP4 files that use H.264 encoding. When a video provider like Vimeo, YouTube, or the iTunes store streams a video, they use an MP4 file with H.264 encoding. Additionally, MP4 with H.264 encoding is one of the video codecs that a Blu-Ray player must be able to decode.
Many hosting services, such as Vimeo, now list MP4 as their preferred file format. Additionally, some video distribution platforms, like Vimeo or Apple’s iTunes store, do not support the FLV format.
The rise of video on mobile devices has changed things as well. For the most part, Adobe Flash content on websites isn�
gary575 on 03 Jul 12
There are two elements of MP4 (actually there are quite a number) that may not be clearly differentiated in the last reference. MP4 adopted the H.264 encoding standard (really more imprtantly the decoding) – and this is the standard that has gotten the most ubiquitous acceptance over the las several years. Previously, there were a wide range of different encoding formats (Adobe used something called VP6 and Microsoft had theeirs, etc.). This proliferation inhibited adoption (other than Flash) and was one of the motivators for Google to buy the company that developed VP6 and release the company’s later product, VP8, as open source. The other reason for this is that M.264 IS NOT open source and carries license fees. Those fees have been waived for end users and small-scale operators, but the amount to large dollasr for major volume entities. Firefox has not supported H.264 because of this.
The other piece is the file format or container – Flash FLV (or ther most recent derivation) versus MP4, etc.
There are also transmission protocols (if you want to get confused, most high quality internet video sites use H.264/MP4 for the encoding and container format, but use MP2-TS as the transmission protocol.
Lots of fun calused by crazy patent and copywrite laws and standards bodies, etc. etc.
John Griffith on 03 Jul 12
I’m not surprised actually, to learn of protocols within protocols, standards within standards, formats within formats etc. In decades past, the more I tried to understand NTSC, the farther it receded into the fog of engineering complexity. While the present status of desktop manipulation of moving picture files, as well as streaming same, was at one time a land far far away, this miracle development has come with a steep learning curve to say the least. I don’t really understand how the “layman” can even buy a TV these days and hope to know if he/she “got the right one”.
How far down this road can we go? Core problem with technology, the more problems it seems to solve, the more it requires of us to manage/ understand/ and cope with.
One aspect of Final Cut Pro is importing media into the program to work on it. That can get pretty interesting. The program tries to help by analyzing the imported media, and automatically adjusting settings. But while that’s nice, in the case of MP4/H.264 files such as my Nikon Coolpix P100 creates, the application “needs/prefers” to redo that format into something it can actually work with a bit better. So you choose an “optimal for editing” format in that case, and the program does something to the imported files to make itself happy.
I haven’t gotten too far into the exporting options as yet, but sure to be, as you say, “lots of fun”.
BTW, as I put together my mini green screen studio here at 600 Dyne, it occurs to me I’ve never asked if you’ve actually done media production work.