As a company, CorFun was using Wink to do presentation and training movies. Wink is an open source application that did a decent job, and rendered its output as swf files that played nicely in a browser. However, as soon as we needed audio for training or demo videos, Wink just stopping cutting it.

We are big, big fans of open source, but Wink and audio just don't work well together. Plus, Wink is only really available for Windows. At CorFun, most of us that do training and demo work use Mac. I have both systems, but it was a hassle to switch to Windows just to use a screen capture program to do a Joomla training video.

So, we have made the switch to Camtasia for Mac. It took a long time for us to make this switch, because screencasting software just seemed to be more primitive for the Mac than for the PC. But then we found this Camtasia package with a free trial and a license fee of only $99.00

Under those conditions, we just had to give it a try. Here is our first video on YouTube which we cut to promote our site seemyseat.com. Okay, it's not perfect. We are still learning the system, and the audio portion could stand some tweaking. But the fault is clearly ours, because this software just plain rocks!

Whether you need to convert PowerPoints to online video presentations, showcase your Website or product, or just answer customer questions, this Camtasia package should give you all the power you need. Unlike Wink, Camtasia renders output as mp4, which means it is much more portable than the swf output of Wink. Plus, the built-in image and audio editing are spectacular. For the money, we couldn't be more thrilled with it.

Bottom line - for small, non-audio online presentations, Wink will suffice. But if you have been waiting to take the plunge on a commercial package, then Camtasia is really worth a look. Especially in the Mac world, this is a great package for the money. We'll be cutting some more videos this week, and hope to improve on the quality each time as we become more proficient.