Captivate vs Camtasia

Report · Mar 19, 2009

Hi all,

I have been using Captivate for a short while and love it. However, i work for a large company with 3,000+ employees and have been asked to share with other training departments the benefit of Captivate over Camtasia (other departments have been using Camtasia for many years but are considering switching).

If anyone has experience with the two or has found documentation comparing the two (recent versions), I would really appreciate it.

Thanks!

Denise

Report · Mar 20, 2009

Hi Denise,

Doing a google search brings you a lot of responses. But the reality is that the two tools are a bit different. Camtasia is not a slide based authoring tool and is more a screen capture/recording tool. You can do quite a few things with Camtasia maybe a bit more smoothly than you can with Captivate in the screen recording arena. However, Captivate is more of a soup to nuts tool. You can start start out blank screen (not available in Camtasia), or you can import PowerPOint slides (Camtasia offers PowerPoint recording) and Captivate offers animation options not available in Camtasia. Captivate DOES have a screen recording option, however, it still renders them in a more broken up format. This is cool for editing but also limits the smoothness of the video framing.

A suggested option is to use them together. Each of the softwares have their strengths and the great thing is that they publish to swf format so you can pull your edited file into the other software for further use. So, if you are just looking to do software tutorials, then I might suggest Camtasia. However, if you are looking to do course building, assessments and evaluations, and things of that nature, then Captivate is your tool. You can do a lot of things combining Powerpoint and Camtasia. But why would you want to for simple things if you can do it with one tool. That said, I like intermingling the tools personally.

Report · Mar 22, 2009

I would like to add that - in case that you want to import audio into your project - there are different methods. In a slide-based-tool like Captivate it is easier planing to work with sound files. It is defined that the slide has the same length as the audio. The project in Camtasia is not divided into single slides. You can record audio with Camtasia but to synchronize it could be complicated. If you have already extended frames to adjust the audio you have to control your timeline very carefully. With a Captivate slides-based project with a visible mousepointer you can see that the computer "drives" the mouse but in a presentation for the learner it has a good structure to simplify the knowledge transfer.

Report · Mar 23, 2009

Hi Denise,

if you have to make the decision between Captivate and Camtasia start with the question: Do I want interactivity?
Captivate is better for interactive demos, but if you decide to produce a demo like a video (tutorial) Camtasia is the better choice.