Camtasia 2021 (Windows/Mac) £216
TechSmith https://www.techsmith.com/video-editor.html
There are now so many different software packages for recording and editing screencasts (videos of activity on a computer screen) that I often wonder why I still use Camtasia? The answer, I think, is that it does the job it is designed to do – and no more. There are plenty of general-purpose video editors which provide basic screencasting as a small part of a huge feature-set for editing camera-recorded video. But Camtasia sticks to its original brief: while it can record webcam video, it remains fully focussed on screencasting.
In recent years, TechSmith has released a new version of Camtasia once a year. The last few releases have each offered a range new and improved features but there have been no really gigantic changes. The same is true of the latest version. The new things in Camtasia 2021 are mainly expansions of, or improvements to, its existing feature set. That means that if you have used Camtasia before you will be able to get started with the new release with almost no learning curve.
So, what are the new features?
 |
| Here the new 'exploding hexagon' transition merges two adjacent clips using an animation |
Running the Windows version of the software, the first thing I noticed was the hugely expanded range of transitions. A transition is an effect that can be used to join together two video clips. In previous releases of Camtasia, the transitions were limited to fairly simple effects such as fades, slides and animated page-folds. In Camtasia 2021 there are over 75 transitions including bubbles, diamonds, waves, arcs and imploding hexagons. To use a transmission you select it in a side panel and then drop it onto the ‘join’ between two adjacent clips. When the video runs, the animation causes one clip to blend into the other using the selected animation.
A few visual effects have been added too. You can add motion blur to make fast action animations (text animations of headlines, for example) look more effective and you can round the corners of either the main recording or of a foreground element such as a video-clip superimposed over a screencast. You can also add background tints to clips to change the colour tone and you can add matte effects to (for example) create a silhouette or cut-out of a foreground element such as text or video. You could, for example, add a matte to a headline so that the background videos shows through the characters.
 |
| A matte has been applied to the text so that the animated background 'shows through' the letters |
One new feature that I was looking forward to using was the Colour LUT (Lookup Table) capability. This lets you apply tonal effects to video clips to enhance the ‘warmness’ or apply subtle global lighting effects. You can see an example of this in the Camtasia demo video below. Sadly, when I looked for the LUT filters I couldn’t find them. On checking with TechSmith I discovered that Colour LUT is only provided in the Mac release of Camtasia, not in the Windows version that I’ve been using. I was assured, however, that it is coming to the Windows product and will be supplied in a forthcoming maintenance release.
Other new features in Camtasia include simplified creation of ‘assets’ such as titles and animations which can be stored for re-use in the Library panel; an ‘emphasize’ audio effect to make it easier to fade background music beneath a foreground narration; plus, various usability improvements have been made to help you work more easily with groups of clips and with multi-file projects. Once again, the demo video below provides more information.
In summary, as in the last few releases of Camtasia, the updates to this new version are mainly improvements to existing features or additions to the range of those features (particularly the hugely expanded number of transitions). The look, feel and core functionality of Camtasia are relatively little changed. This has the benefit that it will be immediately familiar to existing users while its straightforward user interface makes it simple for new users to learn too. Camtasia is still my screencast software of choice. However, as it increasingly faces competition from general-purpose video editing packages which often provide some screen-recording tools, at some time Camtasia will need to come up with a few more “must have” features if it is to distinguish itself from the competition. The addition of Colour LUT in the Mac Camtasia is certainly taking it in the right direction and I look forward to seeing that, as promised, in a forthcoming maintenance release for Windows.
For more on previous releases, refer to my reviews of Camtasia 2020 and Camtasia 2019.
