Camtasia for Mac OS, a nice but very limited beginning

Posted on 09/12/09, in Tech, by Mike

I had been an avid user of Camtasia for Windows until 2006, when I switched to Mac, so I was pleasantly surprised when I read a TUAW post announcing that Techsmith were porting it to OS X. It has been a long-missed app on the Mac, with other contenders available, such as ScreenFlow, not as powerful.

Now, once Camtasia has been released, it looks like ScreenFlow doesn’t have much to fear – the Mac version is severely crippled compared to the Windows equivalent, by the looks of the comparison table available. These are some of the important features they left out:

  • Only full-screen recording, you cannot record only a region of the screen – duh!
  • Recording cannot be paused.
  • No audio-only tracks, ScreenDraw, or markers.
  • No captions.
  • No audio enhancements or replace a portion of the audio track with silence.
  • No production preview or batch production.
  • No customization whatsoever of the Flash player controls, the start and end screens, or the about box.

This may seem offset by features like upload to YouTube or iTunes, but these are bland features as they both only take a couple of extra steps to do manually. Frankly, I will stick with ScreenFlow for the foreseeable future.

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