Corel VideoStudio Pro X4, video screen capture?

Dan7312

I took a quick look at this on their site and I think I know the answer but am asking just to confirm it. Can this product capture the computer screen as video? I think the answer is no.

The reason I'm asking is that I'm always checking for a replacement for Camtasia. It does screen capture as video well but on the editing side of things it leaves quite a bit to be desired even for seemingly simple edits we sometimes have to do.

TIA,
Dan

ziggy53 wrote: »

The package I settled on, not ideal but very competent, is Corel VideoStudio Pro X3, and most recently the X4 version. X4 is currently available (until Oct 15) in the full version for $50USD.

ziggy53

Dan7312 wrote: »

I took a quick look at this on their site and I think I know the answer but am asking just to confirm it. Can this product capture the computer screen as video? I think the answer is no.

The reason I'm asking is that I'm always checking for a replacement for Camtasia. It does screen capture as video well but on the editing side of things it leaves quite a bit to be desired even for seemingly simple edits we sometimes have to do.

TIA,
Dan

No, I don't think that VideoStudio Pro X4 will do video screen captures. It can, of course, edit many different video file formats, including most of what Camtasia will save to ("Produce Video As").

I suspect that you already have a competent video editing software?

Dan7312

I'm already using Premiere to make instructional videos on programming topics. I've used Adobe products over the years so I was able to figure out Premiere and am comfortable with it now and my videos generate enough income to justify the cost.

But we have a lot of authors that write just a few courses. Often they can be comp'd a copy of Camtasia from Techsmith, but when they are not we provide a copy at $400. A less expensive, more flexible video editor would be a big win for us, but it would also have to do capture.


The problem with Camtasia is that for a typical video we make even simple cut takes 20 or 30 seconds. It seems like Cam re-renders entire clips when you do that. And once you make a cut there is no way to recover it. Also with Cam the kinds of editing you can do is very limited. Cam doesn't really act like an EDL editor like Premiere does. With Premiere cuts are just about instantaneous and you can always recover what you cut, and there is lots of flexibility in what you can do.

I've found a number of capture utilities but none as good as Cam's lossless capture. Even the Microsoft Expression encoder does not provide a lossless codec. For things likes slides and code samples that have a lot of text, the net result of a lossly encoder is they just are not quite as sharp as what you see directly on your screen when using the actual tools. We want our videos to be better both in content and production values than the many free programming tutorials on the net. We put a lot of effort into this and we are fortunate our customers notice this and stick with us.

Interestingly enough at this point I've made a workflow with Premiere that doesn't involve Cam at all anymore, but moving current or new authors to Premiere and the workflow I use just isn't practical.

So I'm keep a watch out in case a good edit/capture system appears.

Dan

ziggy53 wrote: »

No, I don't think that VideoStudio Pro X4 will do video screen captures. It can, of course, edit many different video file formats, including most of what Camtasia will save to ("Produce Video As").

I suspect that you already have a competent video editing software?

ziggy53

I moved this discussion from the Smugmug Video Support forum because it doesn't seem to involve SmugMug services. We can carry on the discussion of screen capture and video editing here.

Thanks,

ziggy

Dan7312

Yup, better place for it...

ziggy53 wrote: »

I moved this discussion from the Smugmug Video Support forum because it doesn't seem to involve SmugMug services. We can carry on the discussion of screen capture and video editing here.

Thanks,

ziggy

ziggy53

I agree that Cantasia has some very nice qualities that make it an excellent choice for video screen capture related to training. I had not explored the editing facilities of Cantasia, but it's too bad that it's weak in that area.

I don't see any Windows based freeware video editing software competent enough for your needs, and I don't see any alternatives for Camtasia if you want the features they offer.

The combination of Cantasia and either Premiere Elements, Sony Vegas Movie Studio or Corel VideoStudio Pro is probably the best recommendation, especially for novice video editing.

I'll keep an eye out for video screen capture alternatives and let you know if I find something interesting.

Dan7312

Thanks, that confirms what I have found with respect to screen capture and you keeping me posted if you bump into some screen capture software that's comprable to Camtasia is appreciated.

BTW, my other quest is for speech to text... I've tried what's built into Premiere, Camtasia and the stand alone product from Nuance. I know this kind of stuff can't be perfect, but they would have to be closer than what I've been able to get.

The reason I'm on the speech to text quest is that is it much less expensive to get text translated than to get a video transcribed and translated. Subtitles in the video covers most of our needs for non-English speaking markets. I tried using Premiere and the others, and then have a clerk (because of low hourly cost) listen to the video and correct the text errors, which could then be sent out for translation. Then I found a way to automatically sync the translated subtitles with the video.

But there were to many errors in the auto-transcription for this to end up saving enough on costs to warrent setting up the infrastructure to do this.

If you know of any places that do a good job of transcribing video and could pass them on I'd appreciate it. We are working with a couple now, but none of us are in the video business so I'm sure we've probably missed a lot of them.

ziggy53

Dan7312 wrote: »

... BTW, my other quest is for speech to text... I've tried what's built into Premiere, Camtasia and the stand alone product from Nuance. I know this kind of stuff can't be perfect, but they would have to be closer than what I've been able to get.

The reason I'm on the speech to text quest is that is it much less expensive to get text translated than to get a video transcribed and translated. Subtitles in the video covers most of our needs for non-English speaking markets. I tried using Premiere and the others, and then have a clerk (because of low hourly cost) listen to the video and correct the text errors, which could then be sent out for translation. Then I found a way to automatically sync the translated subtitles with the video.

But there were to many errors in the auto-transcription for this to end up saving enough on costs to warrent setting up the infrastructure to do this.

If you know of any places that do a good job of transcribing video and could pass them on I'd appreciate it. We are working with a couple now, but none of us are in the video business so I'm sure we've probably missed a lot of them.

Sadly, we may be another 20 years before truly dependable, general purpose speech recognition is available. While I'm amazed at what progress has been made in the last 10 years, if you throw background noise, technical jargon, colloquialisms or any sort of numbers/calculations at the systems they either bog down or fail. Even the ability to create custom lookup dictionaries does not help much. The Dragon/Nuance is about as good as it gets it would seem.

I'm afraid that transcriptionists are still the most accurate method, but, as you mention, neither cheap nor perfect. I don't have any personal recommendations for services.

Dan7312

We did try Nuance but also found it lacking. But, as hearsay from another person, I even found a physican who has been using their medical transcription product for years but feels it might well take him less time to just type up his notes instead of proofing and fixing what Nuance captures.

Even with transcriptionist, and I'm sure it's due to all of our techo/jargon, we still have some fixups to do.

BTW, with Premiere, if you have a script, you are supposed to be able to just dump it into the metadata for the clip and it syncs the text up with the sound by adding timestamps to the words. Some of our authors, like me, write a script first and this would be great for subtitles.

Even if the auto-transcription only hits 80% (which is pretty easy these days) it lines up the stuff it doesn't recognize correctly with the stuff it does. I've found that sometimes it works but most often it just doesn't, and ends up failing with a non-descript error. In fact I ended up with an escalated bug at Adobe about it and they promised to get back to me once it was fixed. I'm not holding my breath while I wait though:D

Thanks again for looking at the issue I've brought up.

ziggy53 wrote: »

Sadly, we may be another 20 years before truly dependable, general purpose speech recognition is available. While I'm amazed at what progress has been made in the last 10 years, if you throw background noise, technical jargon, colloquialisms or any sort of numbers/calculations at the systems they either bog down or fail. Even the ability to create custom lookup dictionaries does not help much. The Dragon/Nuance is about as good as it gets it would seem.

I'm afraid that transcriptionists are still the most accurate method, but, as you mention, neither cheap nor perfect. I don't have any personal recommendations for services.

Dan7312

Good news on the Adobe Premiere speech analysis front. The latest version of Premiere now properly accepts an Adobe Story files and uses it as the correct script and just uses the analyzed speech to sync up the wordsbarb

What this means is that if you make your vid from a script you can have perfectly timestamped text which you can use to make subtitles, chyrons etc.

Story is no party to work with, but overall this is a really good thing.

Looks like my bug report, that I spent hours on with Adobe finally got some results...

ziggy53 wrote: »

Sadly, we may be another 20 years before truly dependable, general purpose speech recognition is available. While I'm amazed at what progress has been made in the last 10 years, if you throw background noise, technical jargon, colloquialisms or any sort of numbers/calculations at the systems they either bog down or fail. Even the ability to create custom lookup dictionaries does not help much. The Dragon/Nuance is about as good as it gets it would seem.

I'm afraid that transcriptionists are still the most accurate method, but, as you mention, neither cheap nor perfect. I don't have any personal recommendations for services.

ziggy53

Dan7312 wrote: »

Good news on the Adobe Premiere speech analysis front. The latest version of Premiere now properly accepts an Adobe Story files and uses it as the correct script and just uses the analyzed speech to sync up the wordsbarb

What this means is that if you make your vid from a script you can have perfectly timestamped text which you can use to make subtitles, chyrons etc.

Story is no party to work with, but overall this is a really good thing.

Looks like my bug report, that I spent hours on with Adobe finally got some results...

clap