Recent Updates from Techsmith Camtasia

A recent newsletter from Techsmith alerted me to a handful of updates to their screencasting product line – Camtasia Studio 7.1 for Windows is out, and while I haven't tried it, it promises "Now you can create searchable videos (even the audio!), and automatically generate 508-compliant captions. Plus, you can import caption files in foreign languages."  Here's the full list of changes. Camtasia:mac is up to version 1.2 (downloading now…) with some similar enhancements (full list).  Also, "now videos hosted on Screencast.com can be watched on mobile devices that don't support Flash, like iPhones and iPads."  Looks like that doesn't happen automatically with previously-published content though, as I just visited on my iPhone and was told to go get Flash. 🙁

Finally, you may be interested in sprucing up your title slides for some of your screencasts, and Techsmith first links to the free Juicer 3 program which allows you to make your own (or buy theirs) to import into Camtasia (I hadn't realized there was a version for OSX, so I'm downloading that right now too), but they also point to their page of downloadable assets, which should make things easy.  Hmm, should, but I've just spent the last 8-9 minutes trying to figure out how to import some of the assets I just downloaded into either Camtasia:mac or Juicer3 for the Mac with no success.  I'll let you know how that goes :-/

Update: Well, I couldn't get Juicer 3 to do anything on the Mac, so feel free to explore on your own, but I don't think you're going to get it to do much without buying DVDs from them – I'm uninstalling.  I did have some success with Techsmith's downloadable assets though.  The download page warns that they'll only work with Camtasia Studio 7, but I simply renamed the downloaded file from WidescreenAssets.libzip (which apparently will be opened by Camtasia Studio 7) to WidescreenAssetslib.zip, at which point it acted just like a zipped file, and created several nice folders with mp4 animated files, mp3 music files, and png image files which can then be imported into the Camtasia:mac media folder and Bob's your uncle!