i certainly wont test several screen capturing programs. i needed to produce a high-quality video (capturing me myself) today and i installed an eval version of camtasia studio 7.x. i recorded ~50mins, the software created huge amounts of data in the temporary folders (several GB's i suppose) and deleted them again, the final *.camrec file was (only) ~1GB in size.
on an AMD Athlon II X2 250 (2 years old CPU, and still being sold!) the rendering from *.camrec to *.avi (or *.mp4) takes hours and it consumes 840MB's of my RAM.
...but the result is a truely
high-quality (with zooms, annotations, mouse effects, etc.), small file size video file: 200MB The editing of the *.camrec file is so easy and fun.. It didnt crash. Saved in reduced dimensions (from fullHD to 1 280x720) with no visible (JPEG-type of) artifacts. 200MB for ~1hour HQ-video. Mazing!!
i am impressed.
Code:
*****************snip***************
General
Complete name : C:\camtasiatemp\testvideo.mp4
Format : MPEG-4
Format profile : Base Media / Version 2
Codec ID : mp42
File size : 209 MiB
Duration : 56mn 56s
Overall bit rate : 514 Kbps
Video
ID : 1
Format : AVC
Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile : High@L3.1
Format settings, CABAC : Yes
Format settings, ReFrames : 4 frames
Codec ID : avc1
Codec ID/Info : Advanced Video Coding
Duration : 56mn 56s
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : 510 Kbps
Width : 1 280 pixels
Height : 720 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 16:9
Frame rate mode : Constant
Frame rate : 15.000 fps
Color space : YUV
Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0
Bit depth : 8 bits
Scan type : Progressive
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.037
Stream size : 208 MiB (99%)
Language : English
Audio
ID : 2
Format : AAC
Format/Info : Advanced Audio Codec
Format profile : LC
Codec ID : 40
Duration : 56mn 53s
Bit rate mode : Constant
*****************snap***************
I would imagine that only Adobe releases an even better solution. Bigger, more expensive and better. Which recording software does Kelby Training use, anyone knows? They record with video cameras, i guess.
To me, the best screen capture program *is*
Camtasia Studio. A very modern and stable and easy-to-use mature application.
And small. (~115MB on hdd)