My Review Of CamStudio 2.0

If you are someone who wants to have very nice looking instructional, sales or tutorial videos for YouTube.com or your own website, then you probably have heard of the software called Camtasia. Camtasia is a wonderful screen capturing/recording software that allows you to record what you are doing on your computer screen. You can then do some editing to the video, add text and titles and audio for a professional looking video product. This software is the current 'Cadillac' of screen recording software and it does the job very well. The only thing that may hinder you from buying the software is it's cost. At the time of this review the cost for Camtasia is $300.00 usd.

However there is another alternative! It's called CamStudio. In it's earlier days CamStudio had a lot of issues and bugs that needed to be worked out. There has been and update to it and this is what I think about the updated version:

First off, it's not as fancy as Camtasia and doesn't have the professional features that Camtasia has. It will however get the job done! I use it to create tutorials for my community based websites. It's pretty easy to use, has adjustable parameters, will record both video and audio, the cursor can have the ever so popular yellow highlight on it (or any color you choose), it will output to flash and avi as well as generate the code you would put on your site. The quality is actually pretty decent and the file sizes are small.You can not edited the video in CamStudio like you can in Camtasia but you can add some text and titles.

If you don't have the $300.00 that Camtasia requires after it's free trial period, then you should give CamStudio a try. The older version is freely available. Just Google the name. If you want to see the updated version in action visit The Camtasia/CamStudio Comparison. I think you will be able to get a first hand look at the difference in quality of the two products.

Hope this has helped. :)

PS: Also note that Windows Media Player can also record screens, so you could Google that to learn how to do it.