Why I Switched From Screenflow To Camtasia – And What I Love About It

For the last seven or eight years, I have used one tool for creating almost all the videos here on my YouTube channel for our webinars, for our tutorials. I used a tool called ScreenFlow and it was a great tool for me to use. But about four months ago, I began to shift my entire process over to Camtasia. Now you might wonder why in the world would I switch to Camtasia when I've had so much success with ScreenFlow?

That is a very good question. And that is what we're going to explore today on Donald Trump,

Steve Dotto here, how the heck you doing this fine day? And today we're going to explore the reasons that we have shifted here at Datto tech to creating our videos using Camtasia. Now, historically there are two kinds of superstars in the screen casting domain. They are ScreenFlow, which is a Mac only tool. And there's Camtasia from TechSmith, which is a cross-platform tool working

In both windows and the Mac environment now for the past eight years or so, we have created all

Our videos here at Datto tech using ScreenFlow because I'm a Mac user. And I created all of the videos myself, but we have started to create

More content and I'm starting to rely on some outside editors to help me edit and produce my videos. I record the content and have somebody else do the editing and packaging of the videos. And I was limited using ScreenFlow to only people who were on max. And there were certain editors who I wanted to use, who lived in the windows world. So something had to be done. So I reached out to the folks at TechSmith and I said, I'd like to revisit my publishing system. And perhaps I can take advantage of some of the different tools you offer. And to my delight, they said, we, Steve would love to help you. And they walked me through a process of now creating my videos, using several TechSmith tools, not just Camtasia to the point where we are now producing all of our videos for

Our YouTube channel, for our webinars,

For our online courses, using Camtasia and taking advantage of kind of the TechSmith ecosystem. That's in place to really streamline the entire process, which is what I want to share with you today. So we'll stick around with me and I am going to walk you through why we are now using Camtasia and how it might be able to work for you. Now, one quick, disclaimer is four months ago when I started this conversation with TechSmith, we began having a conference of the conversation at that point to the point where today they said Steve would love to sponsor the development of this particular video. So today's video is brought to you by the good folks at TechSmith. So thanks so much to them for making today's video possible. Let's dive in and have a look.

I would like to begin by showing you our creation process. And I created a mind map to help put kind of everything in context. So typically speaking, when we record a video, I sit down here in my studio and I record the raw content. Sometimes if say, it's just a video that I'm going to be using B roll within a webinar, I will go from nuts to bolts from a to Z, and I will create the whole video myself, edit it all in, create it myself in Camtasia, but more often than not, I do a rough cut of the video where I record all of the raw video elements. I pull as many of the pieces together. And then I assemble a rough cut, which is the narrative flow of the video with all of the different cuts that I want to have in place.

And I just assemble them into a timeline in Camtasia. Now, the cool thing about Camtasia is I save the project file as a project. And that project file that we save can be used in either windows or Mac, depending on which operating system our editor has. So within this rough cut within this file that I share are all of the assets that I have all of the digital assets and he click media and he screens that I want to record as well as still images that I might have grabbed from Snagit and more on that in a minute, because that is where we start to bring the entire TechSmith ecosystem into play. Once we, I have recorded and created the timeline, I then upload that to Dropbox as a package, which as I say is cross-platform available with windows and Mac environment. So my editors can take over.

Now, once the editor takes over, they go through and they create the screencast. They apply all of the transitions. The camera moves. There are a variety of different tools that help us illustrate what we're trying to convey more effectively through cursor moves or through highlighting different areas of the screen. And I'll touch on a few of those features in just a few moments, but this video today is not really about how Camtasia works, but instead how our workflow works. So we will cover these, the, the, the, the screencasting features in an upcoming video. Once they have pulled all of the different assets together, and they've created the video, including all of the different clarity that I want to attach by doing camera moves, attaching our different branding assets, which you would have seen at the beginning of this video, with the little, with the little bumpers that we have, et cetera, then they take that video.

And this is where I really start to get excited because they take the video and they upload it to something called TechSmith video review. And now we are looking at more of the pieces of the TechSmith ecosystem. So we've recorded and created our video in TechSmith, in, in Camtasia. And then my editors can take that video, upload it to video review, where it's available for us to comment and make suggestions and changes to the video. And this is a collaborative, interactive environment where we view the video in real time, make notes in real time. And all of the people included in the process can add their two bits worth and they, it can, we can check off all of the different changes that have to be made. As we, as we nurture this video from it's from conception through to delivery, once that's approved and sent through the final approval, they then upload the finished video to YouTube or we incorporate did in our webinars, are we incorporated in our tutorials or our courses?

We can then apply the video in whatever social platform we want. Now, the benefits of this system are profound working with one ecosystem, working within TechSmith's tools of Camtasia of the video review of using Snagit. We have a rinse and repeat process where we can set up a standardized process for producing our videos that we can rely on that covers off all of the different aspects from content creation in the rough cut all the way through to the initial, edit through to modifying that video and editing that video and making any changes and modifications through to final approval. And finally, the ability for us to upload it and use it in whatever platform we want. So we create this wonderful collaborative process that really has ended up working well for us. So that's a quick overview of the entire system, but what I'd like to do now is I'd like to take you inside and show you just a couple of the touch points.

So you can see some of the unique aspects and see how all of these different pieces of the puzzle kind of fit together. And the first thing I want to show you is inside of the Camtasia editor and what the timeline looks like and how I start to assemble all of my videos, regardless if I'm going to finish the editing, or if an editor is going to finish it off for me, okay. Bear with me. Things are going to get a bit messed up for a moment. What you see here. This is the Camtasia editing window. This is cat. This is this file that you see in front of you right now is actually this video in its embryonic form, as I'm recording it, and I've already recorded the intro in this stuff, that's all happened before this point of the video, I'm recording it linearly so you can see the different elements.

You might recognize some of them that you've just seen a few moments ago. So I've recorded all of these different pieces, and now I'm ready to start trimming them and compiling them into the narrative that I want. So when I record a video in Camtasia, the first thing I do is I record all of the, all of the narrative and all of the screens that are going to be incorporated. Now, one of the beauties of screencasting tools is we can incorporate all of the different elements in the screencast as we record it. And by the different elements, I mean, the camera, the video that you see right now, the audio we can record music. We can have, we can import extra assets like graphics or music. And most importantly, we can also record the screen itself so that the screen becomes a character in our video.

That's the magic of screencasting. As we turn our computer into a character in our video, and we can see all of these different assets in the recording, launching screen, when you start and start recording a new Camtasia video, this is the menu that you see, which allows you to control exactly which pieces you're recording in which assets you're recording. And each of these have a dropdown menu that if I have multiple cameras or multiple audio sources hooked up to my computer, I can use them as a part of the recording. It pulls all of these different assets together, and then it lets us assemble them on the timeline here. So we can see the media bin of all of the things that I've recorded. And we see the timeline. But remember I said, right at the beginning that this, that the TechSmith system for creating these videos is more of an ecosystem.

And that is because TechSmith has several other applications, which I want to show you how they all fit together. So the first I want to talk about is Snagit. Now we have a video that we recorded a couple of weeks ago on Snagit using it for typical screen capture purposes, where you're doing, where you're capturing a screen image and you're sharing it or using it, or marking it up for a variety of different purposes. But because it's a TechSmith product, it also integrates brilliantly with Camtasia. Now this is something that absolutely delighted me when I first saw it. So let me see if I can show you how it all works. I'm going to open just a Chrome instance here, a Google Chrome. And I'm just going to go say to mother daughter tech websites, just because that's where we're going to go. And here are the daughter tech website.

Maybe I want to include the, just a screenshot of the Datto tech website in the video that we're producing. Now. Now when I use ScreenFlow or when you use any other video application, the process in order to get a still graphic that you grab from your computer screen into the video is you have to exit your video editing package. You have to go in and find the image that you want to capture. And then you have to use a screen grabbing tool like Snagit or the screen capture utility. That's built into your operating system to capture that image. Then you have to save that image. You have to remember where you save it. Then you have to go into the video editing package, access that file and upload it into the video editing package for you to be able to use. So it's maybe a five or six step process from beginning to end.

It's not like that using the TechSmith system because I have Snagit installed in my computer. When I say, I want to capture an image, I click on capture and I say, I want this image for my video, and I'm going to just highlight it there. And that's exactly what I'm going to capture it. Now, once it's captured that image, here's the beauty. I don't have to save the image and then navigate to it because TechSmith has this sharing menu, which allows me to share it directly to Camtasia. When I first saw this, I did the biggest little happy dance you can imagine, because when I click on Camtasia, watch what happens. We are now in Camtasia. It takes us right over. And look you, look, you look at what's on my canvas. What's ready for me to use in the video that screen capture all ready to go.

That is brilliant. So it speeds up the process of adding the digital assets that you want for creating a video. It probably saves me with every video. I create five or six minutes, but not only does it save me time with each video I create, but because of the low barrier for entry, because it's not a hassle for me to exit and capture the screen and they have to save that image somewhere and then navigate to that image and have to clean up that image later, because it's either sitting on my desktop or [inaudible], or in a folder somewhere. But instead this elegant process of capturing the image, sharing it to Camtasia, having it dropped directly into my media bin and on my timeline, ready for me to use at any point. That to me is a godsend and it's really improving the quality of videos that we're producing. But we also start to see this integration that I was talking about in the TechSmith ecosystem, where we're editing in Camtasia, but we're now adding extra digital assets, these ones coming from coming from Snagit, but they also have other assets, downloadable libraries that we can use to increase the

Value of our videos as we go.

So that's number one. Once I have all of my assets in place in the timeline, then I go through Camtasia and I do that rough cut, where I listened to the video I scrub along here and I take advantage of some very simple editing tools. And I trim out pieces of the video that I don't want to have in the video. And I create just the clips, which is the linear narrative flow of the video that I want to create, because I'm the person who recorded the video. I'm in the best position to decide where cuts should happen as far as descriptions and explanations, especially of technical things as I'm doing demos. So I do all of that for my editor. And I submit to them, I save this file as what's called a project file, which means it has all of the assets embedded in the file.

We upload that to Dropbox and then my editor can open it and it will look exactly as it looks when I saved it. And they're then able to take it and start to do all of the other things that make our tutorial videos. So great. Now, once they have done all of their magic and created a wonderful video for me, then I have to approve that video and make any changes that I decide they needed. And that's where we're going to show you the text message video review, which again, just like when I discovered the linkage between the, between Snagit and Camtasia, I did a second happy dance. When I discovered just how effective video review is, let me show you, this is TechSmith video review, an online crab [inaudible] collaborative video editor that allows our editor to upload the version of the video that they've just completed and allows us to make comments on that and allows them to see those comments so that they can make changes so that we can go through the approval process much more quickly.

Now, in the past, when we have done approvals for videos, we would basically have to upload the video to Dropbox. I would download the video to my computer. I would watch the video and I would write down notes based on time codes, but I would have to write down at three minutes and 52 seconds, please do this. That's very, time-consuming watch how this works. Here is a video that we just released. This is one of our typical videos, and this is the final version of the video that we just, when I open it up, I can watch that video. You know, I think that one of the most underused features of any of our ecosystem and we can see it. Then you can see that the time code is counting as it goes along. Do you see these little markers here? This is where I have made comments or somebody else has made comments, which we can see all listed here in the side. So if we reach this point here in the video, and I say, oh, can we do something?

If I make that note at this point in the video, and I submit that it then appears here as a time marker as a timestamp within the video. So the editor, when they see it, they will be able to go into that and they will be able to say, oh, Steve made a comment right here, jumped directly to it. They can reply to it. They can give it a thumbs up. They can edit, we can edit it. We can even take that comment. If I go back to that comment here, we can. Even when we make a comment, please change this and we can bring in arrows. We can do squiggly lines to mark something up, or I didn't choose the right tool there. We can do squiggly lines to mark something up and show exactly what it is we're thinking. So we can mark up the screen.

So the editor can see exactly what it is we are thinking about. So this combination of the automatic logging of where changes have to occur badging it so that we can see on the timeline exactly where the different things happen, the ability to be able to go into each of the comments and reply and have a conversation about what's happening within the video is in my mind, just a stroke of absolute brilliance. And so when we take this into account, along with the improved creation tools of using Snagit for capturing graphics, of being assured, that all of the assets are uploaded with the project file, when we create the Camtasia project and then the ability to make changes and edit those changes and have a dialogue and a conversation interactively with the stakeholders within the video and each one, being able to see exactly what the other one said and having a kind of a threaded conversation.

So we can see what we started with and where we got to this gives a tremendous amount of clarity in the development of our videos. It gives me a lot of confidence that the video is being produced exactly the way I want and the small little details in the video now get fixed in the past. If I had to download the video and I had just one change at a certain timestamp within it, chances are I would've let it slide because it's so much work to then upload the whole finished video again, and take a look at that, but here inside of video review, because of the way it works, because it's a, basically a video service where we can have the file uploaded. I don't have to worry about going back into Dropbox and downloading and making sure I have the most current version, all of that's taken care of with brilliant review interface.

So those are the things that make a huge difference in producing high volume, high quality video. I started out today's video with a goal of showing you what our new editing and content creation process is for our videos. And to explain to you why we have shifted from our long trusted tool ScreenFlow to start using Camtasia. You know, if I had never brought on other people to help me with my videos, I would probably still be very happy using ScreenFlow and producing wonderful work with ScreenFlow, but ScreenFlow simply can't hold a candle to the collaborative tools that TechSmith brings to the table. And we only touched on a few of them, but you can see how the entire process from me creating the raw content all the way through to the finished product is so much more smooth and so much, so much more pleasant to do because every person has the tools they need in order to do their job. And we've created a communication capability so that we're always in touch. And we always know exactly where the video is and the people who want to have a voice in the creation of the content have that voice. So I feel so much more in control. I feel so much more, a sense of accomplishment in producing our video because it's a true collaborative effort, and we're not guessing and hoping that people are reading

Our minds as we're producing the content with that. I want to thank you very much for your attention today. If you found this video to be useful, please give us a thumbs up, give us a like, and share a comment or suggestion in the YouTube comments. I read each and every one and value your input tremendously till next time. I'm Steve Dotto, a fun storming the castle.