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Opinions?

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mouser:
i'm going to spent the rest of saturday writing the review draft. then ideally that would give us at least all of sunday to get your feedback and dissenting opinions, etc.

moerl:
Absolutely AMAZING post, nudone! You deserve all the praise for your effort and hard work. That post must have taken quite a bit of a chunk out of your time, and I'm sure all of us here appreciate it. Unfortunately, I don't have the time as of right now to test ALL the contenders, but those that I do look at I will make sure to post about. First on the list of course is Wink. I'll give it a shot right now. I'm very curious to see what's going to come out on top here as well ;)

BTW, the spell-check feature of SMF is the best I've ever seen in a forum-script. Amazing... this is the first time I've gotten to use SMF as well. I like it a A LOT. Nice choice ;)

nudone:
thank you very much Shangnyun.

how's it going mouser - i hope you're coping with all the screencasting comparisons.

i've been playing with bb flashback and wink and thought you might like to know what i've found interesting.

with bb flashback:

using the same project i've been comparing different output settings to see what offers the best quality compared with file size.

quite surprising is that 256 colors produced a larger file size than 16bit - and i do mean noticably larger.

for an 800x600 sized 2 minute recording i got a final swf output file of about 11 meg with the highest settings  :down:.

 :up: on the lowest settings: 5fps, 16bit color, 11khz 8bit mono, i got a final output file of just over 2 meg.

quite a difference and the quality isn't that reduced - the color space isn't perfect but it's better than the 256. the sound still seems good to me at this lowest setting and the 5 frames per second is pretty standard as far as i've encountered when downloading tutorials.

but...

if you output the same project to xvid at the same low sound setting and 5fps you can make the final screencast even smaller (i used the default xvid settings so it would be possible to make it even smaller still).

 :up: using xvid i got a file of 1.6 meg.the video is slightly darker than what it should be and it's not as sharp as a swf movie but for how much smaller it is i think it's worth it.

at the sacrifice of longer encoding times i think double pass encoding with better compression settings and you would get the file size down even further.

from experience i've found that the techsmith codec used with camtasia always produced larger files than using xvid and this proved to be the case when using techsmith and bb flashback.

 :down: the final techsmith encoded file was just under 4.5 meg - it looked brighter than the xvid version but it wasn't any sharper.

anyway, that's it for the moment - can't wait to see what mouser and anyone else testing these apps out has to say.

nudone:
just a quickie...

when comparing maximum quality settings i get smaller swf files when using camtasia than from bb flashback - not really what i was expecting.

it takes longer for camtasia to do the encoding but the lower file size is remarkable - about 3.5 meg compared to bb flashbacks 11 meg. the screencast looks perfect but it is at 15 fps rather than 25 fps which i think bb flashback is doing for it's high quality setting.

one problem i've found with camtasia is that i can't export a compressed audio output when trying to encode with xvid and mp3 so the file sizes are too big - a bit of a shame that.

i've not really played around with the other screencasters but if they are anyting like these two then i think the final review winner could be anything. i find it a bit odd that the 'video' style editor produces smaller swf files than bb flashback and in turn bb flashback produces smaller xvid files than camtasia.

i was going to start praising camtasia rather heavily but i think it lets itself down by not being able to mix between 2 video tracks. other than that i think the swf output it performs means it deserves more recognition than what it is currently getting.

another thing i'm sure mouser will have picked up upon is there are different styles of screencast editors on review - some like camtasia are pretty linear in that you can't really edit single frames for repositioning cursors if you needed to. this is unlike how the 'flash' style content editors work were you can repostion recorded elements on screen in the individual frame/slides.

i can't really see when you would want to reposition the recorded cursor movements, though. so the difference in styles between these two types of editor is merely academic.

i've not revisited 'captivate' yet - i have a sneaky feeling that it will produce the smallest swf files of all. if not, then i'm backing camtasia for swf and bb flashback for xvid and wink because it's free.

mouser:
ive got a lot more to do, but here are is some info to save people some time.

there are really only a couple of contenders to win the award at this point:

1. Macromedia Captivate
2. Camtasia
3. BB Flashback
4. ViewletCAM (this is not viewlet builder, it's their other app, i missed it in part1).

nudone could you try viewlet cam if you get a chance, i was pleasently impressed by it!

the other apps are just not good enough for capturing full screen movies easily.

wink will of course win best freeware though it has a long way to go before it can compete with these big guys.

i will talk about the other apps not in this list a little, but these are the only four real contenders.

i agree with you nudone about finding it hard to think of a case where you would need to move cursor..
the only time i have used it is if i have spliced out some section of the demo, and needed to move mouse in order to keep the continuity which would otherwise be broken because of the sliced out stuff.

to me, all of my biases tell me that camtasia is not the way to go; i just think of this tool as not using a video file codec for recording this stuff and that i want a storage of screens and movements. but i am trying to keep an open mind and i definitely prefer your continued thinking on the matter to help me make up my mind.

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