As I have made couple of those Hollywood with Designer Tutorial videos, I have tried making them with both Camtasia Studio, as well as Demobuilder.
As I like to have some sort of post edit zooming option, I havent found any other choices but these two, and unfortunately, both of these are so expensive (demobuilder 199,- camtasia 299,-) that i havent been able to justify myself to buy either one of them.
However, I noticed both of them offer volume discount. Normally this is meant for example to companies who wish to buy multiple licenses, but I contacted both these comapnies, and they were quite happy to offer volume discount also to organised individual buyers.
Therefore I am asking if there is interest for people to group buy either Camtasia Studio, or Demo Builder?
I am giving you rough idea about main differences between these two.
I have used Camtasia Studio: http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.html
to make Tutorial 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgMhmEUMWOM
And I have used Demobuilder: http://www.demo-builder.com/index.html
for tutorial 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OF8gfDHuNg
You can watch from these some of the differences I am goign to point out.
Notice that I have ran out of both free trials, and I am now talking from memory, so there might be some inaccuracy, plus most of things in both software, I didnt even try.
Camtasia is technically clearly superior, but Demobuilder has couple of great features, that Camtasia simply doesnt.
Both can do all the standard stuff. Record whole screen or partial screen. They have options to highlight things like mouse button pressed etc. automatically. However, when using under emulation environment, all these mosue stuff are useless, since as you can see from my videos, both have two mouse pointers going around, one way or other. Another one is the mouse pointer in emulator, and another one is the mousepointer that is windows mouse pointer.
I tried clicking on top of the emulator arrow while activating amulation window to sync these mouse pointers to go at same location, but it didnt work out. Hence when using to capture amulation stuff, all these mouse things are mainly useless on both programs.
Strange shortcoming in Demobuilder when it comes to recording was that there was no option to record system audio. Hence, if you are planning to make for example longplay video, it means you would have a silent longplay video.
There is a hardware solution to work around this, for you can record microphone during video recording, which means that you could plug your audio out cable into audio in plug, and get system voices recorded instead of microphone, or if you wish to have both microhone and system audio, then you need cable divider to be able to both have audio out in audio in, as well as microphone at same time. But that is extra trouble regardless. With Camtasia you can simply choose wether you wish system voices and or microphone to be recorded too. clearly a winner here.
theres a big difference between Demo builders and Camtasias zooming option.
While Camtasia really zooms, which is very comfortable in many ways, as you could for example simply record whole screen, and then afterwards decide what part of the screen is actually shown, demobuilder uses different zooming. Demobuilder uses like this magnifying glass system.
This magnifying glass is excellent when it comes to my tutorial videos, but unfortunately it has one critical shortcoming. For when you use this magnifying glass option, it doesnt update the magnified part, but it magnifies a still image.
You can see the shortcoming on this on tutorial 3 at 6:23 whre my idea was, that as I am explaining how "power = power +1" keeps changing during the programs run, it was supposed to be so that i keep changing it in way of "power = 1 + 1". I thought it was still image only when editing, and final rendering would have had updating magnifying glass, but i was wrong, and hence many of those zooms are one way or other in bit wrong way. This is a big shortcoming in my opinion.
Where Demobuilder gets a big victory is in its "Amy" character. And yes, it really is called Amy by demobuilder. I wonder if they have some Amiga Background with them due to that.
It was quite easy to put amy on screen and talk all that stuff. I am quite impressed how well she talks, and there were quite many moving options. I used only couple of them to try out a bit and then decided to drop using her, since i was short on time due to trial time ending.
As example when she is pointing with her hands at 0:39, it was done so, that i myself chose how high her hand would move. And similarly rest of the options had the same flexibility in them.
Her mouth was automatically moving based upon what i had typed for the speech synthesizer to say.
rendering time was clearly longer with demobuilder, about double the time compared to camtasia, but normally this doesnt really matter, unless you are making lots of movies in tight schedule.
Camtasia is easier and more natural to use, and also has more options.
In addition, Demobuilder has some small annoiances here and there, like for example if you are planning to record only part of screen, you have to choose it right the first try, otherwise your choice is deleted and you have to make the choice again.
Camtasia keeps saving your choice, that if you choose partial screen area, record video, check the video, and chooce again to record partial screen, it will automatically first show the previous screen part choice which you can also alter making it wider, shorter etc. With Demobuilder you have to choose this screen eveytime again, which is annoying when using for example WINUAE on windows window to do your recording, as you want to have it with pixel exact accuracy, that you first take a test record, see if some bar line is still shown there, and then alter the size slightly. Not to mention that basically you can once again just simply record to whole screen, and use camtasia zooming to decide the screen part afterwards.
With Demobuilder you have to get it right the first time, record the whole video, and if you then notice it went wrong. Only choice to correct it is to choose the screenpart area from beginning again, and record the whole video again and hope it went right this time.
Another example of annoyiance is that demobuilder doesnt have undo. If you cut something out of your video, it gone for good, unless you had made copy of the whole movie file first (which you probably wont be wanting to do every 5 minutes), while Camtasia again has full undo.
Actually Camtasias whole working principle is different. If you have ever used Amiga Dracos video edit thing, Camtasias is similar, that the original video is basically never touched, but remains there forever, and then based upon your cuttings etc. new video is recorded from the original video when you render it.
While demobuilder has just one videofile, and if you edit it (for example by cutting), it affects the original videofile.
This also reminds me that I am not sure you can make a one long video from several video files in demobuilder. While everything in it looked like there was support for putting multiple video files and combining them into one big one, I wasnt able to figure out how to add another video file after another one. So it is possible, that it is simply not possible even. Which means that for example my tutorial 3 recording has to go right the first time, since i cant redo parts of it afterwards anymore. Plus that i had to have all parts of it done at once, that i could do first start, then middle, and finally end at different times, and then combine them together.
With camtasia however, i had no problem doing these kind of things.
To put it short. If you are planning to make longplay videos, then Camtasia is your choice.
If you are planning to make tutorials on how to use website, program or something where you are pushing buttons, then demobuilders magnifying glass option might well be the option.
Plus the Amy character makes quite nice tutor for your video, not to mention that if you feel uncomfortable using your own voice, then Amy saves the day completely. but i do wonder if this kind of speech synhtesizer could be got reasonably priced from somewhere else too that could be used separately from video, although with more trouble, as now you just typed what you wanted to be said, and it was put there in the video automatically to the audio track, and you could keep fixing its position just by dragging, while using outside synthesizer solution, you would first make the speech, save it, and then import it to your video editing software.
If you wish to be sure to be able to do both at least someway, then it is Camtasia again.
Basically I would like them both.
For nowadays I have some difficulty in having a good moment to record my voice. For example turorial 2s audio is so terribly bad, because even i still had time before trial was going to end, i didnt have any time anymore when to record my voice anymore, so i had to live with the lousy recording instead of redoing it properly.
In tutorial 3s case it was great help that I could simply keep typing what i wanted Amy to speak without trying to figure out when i could record my own voice.
Final difference is the pricing issue.
Demobuilders price starts from 199, and group discounts start already from just buying 2 copies at once.
While Camtasias price start from 299, and group discount doesnt start until at least 5 are buying.
But main question is, do you have any interest for group buying one or both of these software?
If there is interest, then we could arrange such group buy. I will get into more details about how this group buy would go in practice, if there seems to be interest towards it.
Right now I am just looking if anyone else but me is interested in buying one of these, and which one.
You may also make more questions regarding these software, and i try to answer as much as i can, but my trying was very limited when it came to different features, since i was in need of only some specific ones that i used.
Also, my guess is that it could be possible that there would exist some video editor software that could do the same as these in after editing, in which case it would be possible to first use free screen record software to do the recording, and then afterwards edit with this videosoftware, but personally i dont know of any such software nor do i know how to try to google such one, hence, if someone does know one, or happens to know screenrecord software that has afteredit with some sort of zooming option that is cheaper/free, feel free to tell about it. |
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