Screencasting tools comparison

The TeleCampus Course Development Team at the University of Texas recently completed a side-by-side comparison of the major screencasting tools.  Look across the top of the page for the links to demos of Captivate, ViewletBuilder/ViewletCam, and Camtasia.  Last "tab" is a comparison, which I found a little confusing.  There are numbers running down the left side that don’t have a key.  At first I thought they were the number of products that could do X in the grid, but that didn’t seem to match up.  The MS Word version is a little easier to read.  While I only skimmed the grid, I noticed some of the information to be suspect (for instance, they indicate ViewletBuilder isn’t available for the Mac – oh wait, the Mac version appears to have been pulled from the Qarbon site!).  Ok, the only other thing I noticed then was that their prices seemed a little high – I don’t think the prices on their grid represent educational discounts for Camtasia or ViewletBuilder.  They also don’t tell us specifically which versions of the software they were using (Camtasia recently released a new version, for instance).  I found it ironic that the Macromedia product seemed to do the worst job of capturing a flash file!

Thanks to Karen in Winnipeg for the link.