Did you ever want to show someone an error message on your computer or how you fixed something? Techsmith has a suite of amazing tools that make taking screenshots and doing video tutorials easy!

What’s Out There for Screenshot and Screen Recording Software?

I’ve been in IT for 10 years and always find sharing images makes things easier to understand. A year ago, I began doing  video tutorials to help my clients really get the hang of technology training topics.  I found out these were called screencasts so I began researching my options.  I started out by trying free and open source tools like Wink and some screenshot tool that fit on my flash drive, probably sourced from PortableApps.com.

Video Screencasts with Camtasia Studio

Camtasia Studio is the most professional product for creating professional and easy to follow video screencasts. I tried free products and found them bulky, slow and lacking features.

Powerful Screenshots with Snagit

Snagit is amazing because it saves you time taking screenshots. You can take sequential images, upload directly to Flickr, use the Snagit Editor for quick cropping and text overlays.

Quick and Easy Screenshots and Video for PC and Mac!

Jing is the newest product by Techsmith and it allows you to quickly capture and share screenshots and short videos. I’ve found Jing to be a lifesaver when I need to share a screenshot via a forum or through a chat session. No FTP or complicated web addresses. You get a short and tiny url to share your image or video. The screencast recording abilities in Jing just keep improving! With Jing Pro you can upload directly to YouTube or edit the recording in Camtasia Studio. Screen capture with Jing is just plain easy!

Testing, Testing, Is This Thing On?

I kept testing tools, asking for feedback from my clients, friends, family — “How does this look?”  ”Is it clear?  Is the video smooth or jumpy?”.  I kept reading reviews on screen recording software that kept talking about Camtasia Studio.  Jeff of CodingHorror who always lays down the essentials in a quick and dirty format also listed Camtasia Studio as screencasting option.  I was ready to take a trial run of Camtasia Studio.

GTD My Screenshots

photo credit: yusheng

Meanwhile, I’d come to a similar conclusion about my needs for a screen capture solution.  I was trying to take a lot of screenshots and wanted to GTD the process as much as possible.  I looked at the most time consuming parts of taking screenshots:

• Naming the images
• Organizing the images
• Sizing the images
• Quick edit of the images
• Sharing the images

I did a trial of Snagit and knew it was the right tool for me!  I could create profiles which allowed me to set preferences about the file name, size, save location and more.  For $50, it seemed a bit steep as I’d never paid for a screenshot program on Windows before but I got my money back in saved time.

Technology Stories Come To Life

Just like I’m still new to creating videos at AskAdria.com, I was green to recording screencasts and had no idea about size, frame rate, editing options or making videos that were HD quality.  I struggled to catch up with this image of “professional video creators” who used tools like Camtasia Studio flawlessly.  I watched videos created by companies like 37Signals, read the Techsmith blog for tips, read through their online training so I could understand the scope of the software.  I wanted to deliver the best product I could.

One of my earliest videos I uploaded to YouTube, “Joomla, Make your website beautiful overnight“.  Now while I look back at it and go, “sheesh!” it’s been viewed over 29,000 times and I’ve had people contact me via email, phone calls and leave comments about how helpful it was!

After The Purchase

So a lot of technology reviews talk about how exciting and amazing a product is but don’t tell you about the product after it’s been in use for a while.  Well…here’s the skinny!  Techsmith is great!  Their support staff have always gone the extra mile when I’ve contacted them for support.  In addition, they have spent time and resources to grow their website to include an active blog and have a technology evangelist, Betsy Weber,  on staff to be the face of their products.

They are on Twitter (@TechSmith), do live streams on Ustream and basically do whatever they can to reach out to existing and potential users of their screencast/screen capture/tutorial/learning kingdom!

You may be saying, “Adria, tell us about the dark side of Techsmith.”  Well, the one downfall they currently have is their antiquated ticketing system (custhelp).  It has a seperate login than the screencast.com site (SSO Single Sign On would be great!) and I’m not successful at being able to reply to updates from Techsmith staff.  This means I have to go to the support site and login.  Maybe Zendesk will help TechSmith slip into a shiny new helpdesk and ticketing system!

By using these tools from Techsmith, I’m able to communicate powerful and effective technology concepts through images and video which I get great feedback on so I give a thumbs up to all the Techsmith products!