14 DAY TRIAL // As time passes by and the video tutorials market grows, the competition in the field goes up at the same rate, sometimes even exceeding the market's growth. To keep up with your competition you need more than just skill, passion and time - you need the best tool to help you get the best out of them. Of course, freeware enthusiasts will keep writing HTML tutorials with screenshots saved using Ms Paint, but as a professional you will need more.
This is the time when you can test a lot of applications that claim to be the best screen capture utility on the market or go straight to our pick - TechSmith's SnagIt. SnagIt is pretty easy to learn, has a lot of features, and can be used for more than just one goal - it can capture still screen or full-video, it can edit the captured content, and it also has an image viewing module. Just one more thing before we talk about the main program features - SnagIt is shareware, you can test it for 30 days before you decide to buy it or not.
When you run the program for the first time, you will notice the clean and modern interface. From the main screen, you can do all that you need - start a capture, change your profiles, access the Editor or the Catalog Browser.
SnagIt has 4 capture modes in order to suit all your needs - image, text, video and web capture. The Image Mode allows you to take a capture of your screen in graphic format and then edit it using the Preview Windows or the Editor in order to save, print, e-mail or upload it to a FTP server.
The Text Mode is an easier and smarter alternative to Edit>Copy/Paste, and an extremely useful helper for people who often find themselves writing down text from the screen or a dialog box. Just think about how nice it is to be able to capture all the text from the screen or the clipboard, without any graphics, to an ASCII file.
Video Capture allows you to create a movie of what is happening on your screen.
Finally, the Web Capture Mode allows you to scan and gather images published on a website. A really useful feature is the delayed/scheduled capture that can be used when you need extra time to set up a capture, such as for a menu or a dropdown list.
Since we're done with the capture modes, let's get to the 2 built-in tools - the Editor and Catalog Browser.
The SnagIt Editor can be used to edit your screen captures, after saving to a file and enhance the result. Editing options include flip, mirror, rotate, shear, crop and cut. You can also adjust the color depth, add text or view the frames of a video capture. When it comes to image processing effects, there are a lot of them ready to use, such as blur/sharpen, posterize, pixelate, oil painting and many others that you'll have the pleasure to discover using the program.
The Catalog Browser can help you locate, view and manage captures and multimedia files in thumbnail view. It can view images, text and .avi files. You can also use it to save, e-mail, convert or print multiple files in batches. It can set an image as desktop wallpaper and help you boost your productivity with its management tools.
Before drawing the line, I should add few more things that can be done with this program. You can convert images easily straight from the main window, create a web page using the available images from a given folder, or use it to capture straight to your Office document via the SnagIt Add-In, and it doesn't stop here.
The Good
SnagIt is easy to learn, it has a clean interface and a rich set of features. It has a very good price for what it can do, and also when compared to its competitors (only 39.95$).
The Bad
Video capture file size is limited to 2GB, and you risk losing your entire capture if the limit is exceeded. The Editor and the Catalog Browser are a bit slow when using large files and they may even crash sometimes. A thing to be avoided is having large images opened in the Editor and the Catalog Browser at the same time.
The Truth
SnagIt is a program worth trying, at least. When they will add the feature to save video captures as swf files ready for web, it will be my favorite screen capture utility. I recommend giving it a chance, I am sure it won't disappoint you.
Here are some screenshots of the program in action:
