Okay, so many of my colleagues are away on holiday at the moment, and that can make getting everyone into one room to show them a presentation difficult.

Unfortunately, I wanted to show some of out Sales and pre-sales guys some of the ‘standard’ customisations to search that I was working on last month. I could do screenshots and Powerpoint – but it’s slower to create, and not as easy to see as a video.

Well, I’d heard of Camtasia, and it transpires they’ve a 30 day free, so I thought I’d give it a go. Well, it is very good. Clearly, there is a lot to the program – much more than I’ve used – but I was able to get a video recorded showing my stuff in an hour. Not bad when the film itself is 20 minutes long!

It has some really neat features, too, like zooming and panning to where you’ve clicked, so that if you’ve only got a small video resolution you can still see the important bits on an activity at 100% zoom.

What I would say is that the documentation and introductory videos do seem to gently suggest that planning what you’re going to demonstrate might be useful – and they’re right. I’d say from my short experience that planning what you’re going to do is essential. As is a decent mike – my seemed to struggle a bit.

Anyway, would I pay $300 for it? Well, for the company, yes, it’s a snap. It isn’t something that a ‘home’ user is likely to pay that for, but for business quality screen recordings, I wouldn’t look any further.