How to Use Camtasia Studio Screen Recording Software

If you’ve ever wondered how people create those great tutorials shown on YouTube or whatnot, you’re in luck. Today I’m here to talk about video screen capture software, and specifically how to use Camtasia by TechSmith. First off, you don’t need a video camera over your shoulder to record what you’re doing on your computer screen. In fact, you don’t even need a video camera, period. That’s where Camtasia comes in. Screen recorder software records what is being displayed on your monitor without the fuss of external hardware.

Using Camtasia Studio to Record Your Computer Screen

When you open Camtasia Studio, the first thing you’ll notice is how user-friendly the layout is. When you mouse-over most icons or areas, a little pop-up will go into further detail and explain what said object is or does. This is a life-saver to a newcomer into screen capturing software. There is nothing more frustrating than having a great piece of software but have no idea where to begin. Cantasia Studio even comes with a nice intro tutorial to go through some of the basics. We thought we’d try our hand at creating a video tutorial with Camtasia to show how easy creating a video tutorial is with Camtasia. Basically, we used Camtasia to record our Camtasia recording. Confused? So are we.

I created a mock project to use as an example. I then opened a new Camtasia project and showed the basics of the zoom function and exporting your video for web uploading. While Camtasia boasts all sorts of other great features like callouts (overlay text bubbles), transitions, and title clips, due to length constraints I couldn’t tackle them all in this tutorial. However, with the easy-to-use layout, it only will take a few minutes to figure out.

Bottom Line

I was quite impressed with how quickly I was able to create my own web video tutorial. From the time I first opened Camtasia Studio to knowing how to zoom, add transitions, and export the video for the web all took me less than an hour. The hardest part was the audio overlay. I had to do several takes due to speech flubs. That’s where adding your own audio after-the-fact comes in handy.

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