Screen Recording – An Enterprise Approach to Streaming Media Publishing
Of course, a table of contents does no good without a way to present it. Streaming presentations that include navigation, embedded controls, or tables of contents need to be wrapped in interfaces built with HTML/JavaScript, SMIL, or both. Screenwatch stores a list of your streaming servers and Web servers, and lets you pick from those (or enter new ones) when you publish a presentation. Just select the Web and SMIL template you want to use, and all the files are transferred (via FTP) to the right places for you. In its latest release, Screenwatch can also publish directly to a Blackboard learning management system.
If you're an educational institution or company that publishes lots of presentations, your users don't have to know much about the technology to get their presentations out to the audience. Server information files, HTML and SMIL templates, Real and Windows Media encoding settings all are stored in config files that administrators can set up and distribute to the PCs of everyone who needs to do recordings.
On the other hand, if you're recording in a classroom or studio facility, you may want to handle the recording of audio and video from a sophisticated A/V system, and drive the screen recording from a producer's console. Screenwatch helps support high-end and high-volume production by letting you remotely record the display of another Screenwatch-equipped computer over the network.
The Screenwatch installation includes the Milori Training Tools, a set of third-party utilities that allow you to draw directly on the computer screen, magnify the region around your mouse cursor, overlay text notes on your screen, and more. The tools are not directly integrated into the product the way Camtasia's tools are, but they are useful nonetheless, particularly for recording software training materials.
Conclusion
Screenwatch and Camtasia are both screen recorders, but serve distinct markets. Camtasia supports recording audio-narrated screen recordings, provides a slick, polished interface and rich tools for post-production and editing, gives lots of options for output formats, but leaves managing the delivery process entirely to the end-user. Screenwatch is an industrial-strength tool that, with a little administration, handles soup-to-nuts publishing for non-techies, supports video as well as audio to accompany screen recordings, integrates well with presentation slideshows, and automatically publishes to the Web.