"Hi Richard! I recently started using Camtasia and I'm pretty good with most of the features. However, I'm not happy with the audio quality. Any tips? What kind of microphone do you use? And, have you tried the blanket over the head technique suggested in the Camtasia product documentation?!? That technique sounds a little odd! :)"

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I don't use either Camtasia or Captivate, so I cannot say a lot about them except this: I have noticed that some of the files created with Camtasia tend to be larger ones. Captivate and Viewletbuilder on the other hand tend to be about half the size.

I don't know if this is because Viewletbuilder acts much like Powerpoint (in fact its SWF files - that include audio - are not much larger than a typical Powerpoint presentation), whereas Camtasia seems to act more like a movie file (Richard Baer can tell you more about this than I can as he uses Camtasia.)

I also know that because of the way Viewletbuilder operates (i.e. not like a movie), it enables you to add audio and text and associate them with individual slides so you can do a lot of re-recording if you do not like the first recording. This means that you can get pretty finicky about things (and have a project where the audio and text match exactly), whereas with Camtasia, it seems to summarize what you said. Richard did some work on this by using its Pause Feature so there are regular pauses (am I right Richard?) so it would stop and summarize things in close sequence to the actual screen displays.

One thing I will say that I do like about Camtasia is its zoom in and out feature. I don't know if it is in the newest Viewetbuilder or Captivate however. But it is useful. As for Captivate I noticed it has a useful Table of Contents feature that is also useful if people want to select what to view.

I do hope some of this helps. Others with experience using either should also comment.

Cheers,

Carmen Kazakoff-Lane"