Camtasia 2018
Professional–looking screen recordings to share online
$249 From Techsmith, techsmith.com Needs OS X 10.11 or later
If you need to create a screen recording of your Mac to, say, make a tutorial video or demonstrate a process, you have two options. You can use QuickTime Player to make a rudimentary video, or you can do it properly with a tool designed to make your recordings professional–looking.
Of the tools in the latter category, Camtasia is one of the leading lights. As well as making it easy to record video from your screen and FaceTime camera, system audio, and the Mac’s microphone, it has a ton of useful editing features.
New for 2018 is a redesigned media library that allows you to organize clips by video type, and a rendering speed boost that TechSmith claims amounts to a 50% improvement. Also new are themes, which allow you to create and save sets of custom color and font preferences. This is particularly useful if you plan to create and brand a collection of videos as part of a series — you can quickly and easily give them the same look and feel.
There are new royalty–free assets, including customizable intros, outros, and lower thirds. You get a handful free with your purchase, and more are available on subscription for $200/year.
Camtasia is straightforward to use. Once you’ve created a project, you can start, stop, and pause a recording using the menu bar item or keyboard shortcuts. Clips can be paused and resumed, and added to the library when you’re done. From there you can edit them, arrange them on a timeline, add hotspots for the mouse pointer and callouts, and then export the whole thing or share it online.
The system requirements are steep. However, we tested it on a 2013 MacBook Pro, which has only two cores, and had no major problems or issues.
The only real complaint is that if you want to get the most from Camtasia and add animations and effects, you’ll need to spend a fair bit of time learning how they work. However, in every other way, Camtasia 2018 is an excellent tool that makes recording your screen a breeze.
the bottom line. Camtasia 2018 is an excellent upgrade. However, it’s significantly more expensive than Screenflow, and that may be enough to put newcomers off.