[nickjj]

How does it compare directly to Camtasia in a real world comparison?

For example with Camtasia, you can click 1 button and have your desktop + audio + optional webcam all being recorded to your video project, and then you can hop in and edit it with a bunch of great tools and presets. This includes complex animations and tooltips with doing nothing more than dragging around a few sliders.

Basically you can get up and going with an excellent work flow as 1 single person who isn't a video editing god.

Where does Shotcut stand compared to that?

At this point price isn't an issue for people in a position to create videos. It's all about how fast it is to go from an empty folder to a high production quality video.

Camtasia is one of the only reasons why I run Windows so if your project can solve all of those problems, that would be an incredible feat since Camtasia seems to have no intent on supporting anything but Mac / Windows.

Also if it helps gauge the comparison I have tried kdenlive about 6 months ago and compared to Camtasia I would rate kdenlive a 0.001 and Camtasia a 9.5 on the sole task of "quickly create a nice looking screencast".

[pjc50]

> At this point price isn't an issue for people in a position to create videos

There's an awful lot of people who want to break into Youtube with no money.

There's also a small but well-represented on HN market of people who want to have an OSS/Free Software only workflow.

[nickjj]

I'm all for OSS too but when it comes down to it, if you're serious about video editing, this isn't really a tool you can make compromises on (and trust me, I spent a lot of time trying before pulling the trigger on buying Camtasia).

This is after having recorded about 50 hours of real-time video over a few years. There's just so many things you absolutely need to be happy and productive when recording -- especially if you plan to do this for a living.

Using a bad video editor (and I'm not saying Shotcut is bad because I haven't installed it yet) is just a really draining and time wasting experience.

It takes me around 70 minutes of real life time to produce 10 minutes of video after years of work flow optimizations and using what I think is one of the best tools available to make screencasts. Almost all of that time is spent editing in Camtasia (stopping and starting the recording, correcting mistakes, adding post-production effects, etc.).

I would love to switch to an open source tool (for many reasons) but the reality of the situation is, I wouldn't switch unless it was remarkable because it's such an important tool if you're livelihood depends on making videos.

[tjoff]

And there are way more video recorders than people on earth, lots of people want to create videos from their children, family gatherings, vacations etc. if only they knew how.

[beojan]

Where would you rate Movie Maker, and where would you rate Premiere Pro?

Shotcut and Kdenlive are fundamentally video editors, which happen to be able to do screen recording. Camtasia is specifically a screen recorder.

[nickjj]

Camtasia is much more than a screen recorder.

Look at a couple of Youtube videos on Camtasia 9. It is a full fledged editor (and also does audio / video recording too). That's the winning property of it.

You just click a button to start recording, deliver your video content, press stop and then you can immediately start editing your content. Then you export and you're done.

With something like premiere you would have to record your audio and / or video with a different tool and spend a lot of time importing. I also found premier's UI to be crazy complex (in a very non-intuitive way). I haven't tried movie maker.

Camtasia's editing effects are just enough to make really nice screencast style videos without being overwhelming. I've gotten hundreds of positive reviews on my tech courses that were related to the production quality of the videos.

For example, the video on this course page[0] was made fully with Camtasia 9. All of the animations and even the slides / tooltips.

That whale animation and text dropping effect took around 5 minutes to make from scratch once I figured out what I wanted to do. All I had to do was pick some things from a few drop down boxes and drag 2 or 3 sliders around.

[0]: https://diveintodocker.com/

[beojan]

> Camtasia is much more than a screen recorder.

Sure, but fundamentally, Camtasia is a screen recorder. It's purpose is to make screencasts. If you were editing video filmed with a camera, you would find Kdenlive, Premiere etc. more useful than Camtasia.

[nickjj]

It depends on the extent of the film recording.

Camtasia works really nicely for doing floating head videos and it has options for dealing with green screens and video touch ups.

That also means it works fine for doing product review videos or vlogging. Basically video coming in from a single source.

It's not comparable to something like after effects but if you just wanted to record something with a video camera then Camtasia will work no problem for both the recording and the editing of that video.

All of its animations, transitions, zoom, panning and pop up tooltips can be applied to that film recording just like you could with a screencast recording.

You can even combine both that film recording with your screen recording as different tracks. It really is a versatile product for all things related to creating videos.

I'm not affiliated with Camtasia either, and I would switch to an OS solution immediately if something existed that was comparable but the only tool that I know of that is remotely close is Screenflow and it's MacOS only + paid, so it's basically just a direct competitor to Camtasia (Camtasia runs on MacOS too, and its project files are compatible with both Windows and MacOS).

[banderman]

OBS is fantastic for screencasting: https://obsproject.com/

[nickjj]

OBS is pretty much best in class for live streaming, but it's not a video editor. Both are much different use cases.

[banderman]

You can use it to record your screen, not just to live stream.

[nickjj]

Yes, but then you need another separate tool to do post-production editing. That's where it falls short for usage outside of live streaming.