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.

When the video runs, the animation causes one clip to blend into the other using the selected animation.Ī few visual effects have been added too. To use a transmission you select it in a side panel and then drop it onto the ‘join’ between two adjacent clips. In Camtasia 2021 there are over 75 transitions including bubbles, diamonds, waves, arcs and imploding hexagons. In previous releases of Camtasia, the transitions were limited to fairly simple effects such as fades, slides and animated page-folds. A transition is an effect that can be used to join together two video clips. Running the Windows version of the software, the first thing I noticed was the hugely expanded range of transitions. Here the new 'exploding hexagon' transition merges two adjacent clips using an animation 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. The new things in Camtasia 2021 are mainly expansions of, or improvements to, its existing feature set.

The last few releases have each offered a range new and improved features but there have been no really gigantic changes. In recent years, TechSmith has released a new version of Camtasia once a year. But Camtasia sticks to its original brief: while it can record webcam video, it remains fully focussed on screencasting.

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. 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.