Video editing software for windows 7

I've been looking at screen capture programs so far, so bad. I first tested wink and made quite a few tutorials with it. It even made very nice menus. There was only one problem, wink although an excellent tool continually crashed when doing voice-overs in windows 7.

Wink has the ability to create interactive flash (swf) files, menus, navigation arrows, call outs, internal and external hyperlinks. The menus I created worked well together. (see some of them here) Everything seemed fine with wink, except when it started to crash in windows 7. I also discovered that wink does not create YouTube videos and therefore limits the program. Much of my work calls for the videos to be able to be published to YouTube, specifically our institution's YouTube channel.

I next looked at Camtasia Studio 8 for windows. The program looked pretty good at first. I tried a couple of tutorials. They worked very well. One can do voice overs or record the voice during the screen recording. There are a number of transitions one can easily include in the project that are included in the software. There are also call outs, themes, etcetera that are included in the software. I next looked for a menu system that would make these video tutorials usable. The software comes with a tool called MenuMaker. I tried this tool. It is impressive in what it can do. The problems showed up immediately. First, you can make very cool tables of contents for each presentation. The only problem is that when you make a menu with more than one presentation per menu, only one table of contents (TOC) shows up per menu, not per presentation. Also when you create a menu the MenuMaker tool does not copy all the files needed, so you lose some of the interactive content that can be put into the presentations. Second, the result of the MenuMaker tool was an application created as an .exe file. That means that it only works with windows based computers. At least Camtasia can create YouTube videos.

I was contacted by tech support and they had some suggestions on how to resolve my TOC problem.  One that I tried was to publish in a different format than the suggested one for Table of Contents (TOC) embedded files.  Techsmith suggested using wmv format instead and to be sure to include the html embedding option and the TOC option.  I did this and although the publishing worked beautifully, the TOC of each file didn't seem to do anything at all.  They finally suggested making my default browser Internet Explorer - that works, but is unfortunately only a workaround.  They do provide a publishing option to upload to their website screencast.com (you can check out the network setup videos I put on screencast here), this works very well, but does not do menus very well.

I ended up purchasing Camtasia Studio and am fairly happy with it.  I am just waiting for them to iron out the MenuMaker bugs.

One really nice thing about Camtasia studio is that there is a techsmith player for iOS (in the appstore).

If you use other software for tutorials creation and menu creation I would be more than willing to hear about it.

For those who track this kind of thing the original blog I posted concerning this is located at: http://thomaszuckerscharff.com/2013/07/03/screen-capture-programs/

I have made some changes and additions for this article.  I also felt this was a needed followup to the original article I posted on wink.