Connector Review: Movie Maker, iMovie and Camtasia Studio

Posted in business, digital Marketing, social media, videos by Dave Dungan on May 31st, 2010

Video is taking over the Internet. After Google, You Tube is the second largest search engine in the world ahead of Bing and Yahoo. Last year they hit 6.6 billion streams and currently have over 73% of the online market. With this in mind, anyone who wants to seriously market themselves online needs to be doing video.

You’ve probably heard already how video is great to add to your website, how it can be great for SEO and how users love to share good  video with their friends. The reason many people are not doing video is because they think that it is either too expensive to produce or requires technical skills they don’t possess. Luckily there are a number of tools available that make it possible to edit your own video.

Microsoft Movie Maker

Windows Movie Maker is the one that most people are familar with. It comes freely available with Windows software or can be downloaded for free from the Microsoft website. It has basic video editing features that allow you to make your own videos without any great technical knowledge.

It allows you to import various clips, sequence them, clip them and apply basic transitions and effects. In addition to this it allows you to record voice narration and produce and share your video on YouTube or your blog. The drag and drop interface is really easy to use and the functionality is perfect for making basic promo videos for events or customer testimonial videos. There are limitations however.

If you want to use more advanced video techniques like screen record, Movie Maker does not offer this. Nor does it offer features such as callouts, zoom and pan or cursor effects. Overall it is a great package for most of your needs and it’s ease of use makes it ideal for beginners.

Apple iMovie

If you are using a MAC then Apple iMovie pretty much gives you the same deal as Microsoft Movie Maker. It is freely available with any new MAC but unlike Movie Maker it is not freely available to download.

It offers pretty much the same functionality and ease of use as it’s Microsoft equivalent and is ideal for anyone looking to do basic promo videos without having to spend a fortune or learn how to operate complicated software.

Camtasia Studio

Camtasia offers all that the others do plus loads of nifty features, plus it is available for PC and MAC. Like Movie Maker and iMovie the interface is intuitive and easy to use although the additional features add a little extra clutter if you’re not planning on using them.

Some of the extra features include Record Screen and Record Powerpoint functionality which are great for doing video tutorials. In addition to this it offers more advanced effects such as Zoom and Pan, Callouts which allow you to write over your video or images, Cursor Effects that allow you to highlight mouse clicks, and more advanced audio editing features.

Camtasia will cost you around $300 to buy so if you’re not planning on using the extra features it’s probably not worth your while. They offer a 30 day free trail that will allow you to test the product before putting your hand in your pocket so it’s definetely worth a look in.

Conclusion

Basically if all you need to do is pop up a few video interviews or make a very basic promo, the first two options are ideal. If you would like to feature video tutorials or use more advanced editing techniques then Camtasia is the way to go. We’ll be posting some live tutorials ourselves really soon to help you get to grips with each of these products so keep in touch!