Snagit

SnagIt is a cool screen and video capture tool which makes it really easy to edit, share and import them into your other projects. It's relatively affordable currently at forty nine US dollars and there is a fully functional fourteen day trial available to get started with no credit card required which is good. The software is very user friendly and makes creating tutorials enjoyable. It's intuitive to learn and use with all of the features, settings and help you need available inside the very small tab which hovers at the top of your computer screen ready to use at a moments notice. The conversion capabilities in SnagIt are one it's stronger features. You can output your image or video file to work with Microsoft OneNote or any of the Office 365 products. As well as Dropbox, Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Skype, Youtube, Flickr and a few others quickly which differentiates this software from others in their market. You can manipulate images to a good extent too with pencil, hand, eraser, image uploads and more with color fills, border and other effects available as well. You can also use FTP to transfer data between SnagIt and your server which may useful in specialized scenarios. It is a big time saver in that you can take longer videos than their free product Jing, so you can use SnagIt to create video tutorials or for other purposes that are longer than five minutes each. You're not constantly having to stop and start like when using Jing yet it's a sixth the price of their Camtasia product which adds more enhanced video editing capabilities. You can link to a hotkey on your keyboard for a quicker way to start using it. Any trick which helps speed up my workflow is good and keyboard shortcuts are a big time saver when you utilize them. The Google Chrome plugin is another useful way to make using it even quicker and it was a seamless installation in my experience. There are good video guides and other resources available on their site and elsewhere online to help you get the most use out of all the features and functionality. But the software is easy enough to install and begin using within five or ten minutes for most people I would venture as a guess. I've used Jing for years and appreciate the value it provides for free. It turns out that free value is a smart business model by TechSmith because it's only natural for me to consider their upgraded products based on reciprocity and brand loyalty, but also because I know the software works well in a lot of situations and is very reliable.

It seems you can't edit the text blocks you create on top of a image file once you close and then re-open the file. Which isn't a major deal but would be more efficient to not have to do this work twice. The share options are nice to have and certainly useful but it doesn't seem to allow you to share on your personal Facebook page, only on your Fanpages which seems somewhat limiting.

The ability to output your video or images to so many useful sources with a couple of clicks is what makes this software most unique. Overall, Snagit is an easy investment to make for the audio and video capturing capabilities, but if you need image screenshots only just use a free Chrome extension called Awesome Screenshots as this has the same image functionality as Snagit already though without all of the same sharing functionality. It's a great software for creating professional tutorials with audio which are longer than five minutes each. Both of these features are the main differences between SnagIt and their free offer Jing. But the ROI possible from this software is huge considering there is no monthly charge to use it, while you can use the videos and tutorials created from it to earn recurring or one time purchase revenue with your tutorials.