

Can your software budget be broken out to get half your team Captivate and the other half Camtasia?.

I realize most corporate training budgets probably won’t provide for the entire design/development team to own both applications but that just means you need to be creative. If you’re interested in making the case for both applications, here are a few challenges you may experience and some suggestions for managing them.

“Which simulation tool should we use, Camtasia or Captivate?” Each application offers a very different approach to screencasting so it’s common to find people asking how to go about choosing one or the other. If you’re looking for a place to start, you have a lot of choices, but the two most important (PC) applications are still Captivate and Camtasia. Most notably is ScreenFlow which was just released a week ago. That’s all changed now and even the Mac has seen viable alternatives to SnapzPro. Trying to capture anything larger than 640×480 required a high end machine and if you wanted to post to the web, you had to get creative with frame rates, key frames and color depth. I still remember recording with HyperCam back in 1998. As someone who’s created web-based video tutorials for almost ten years, I’ve tried just about every screen recorder developed. The latest versions of Captivate and Camtasia confirm the screencasting & video tutorial industry is quickly evolving.
