If you are looking to start creating videos, there is a fairly low-cost tool available called Wondershare DemoCreator. In this post I’ll go over some of the features of DemoCreator and my opinion of the software for creating videos. This is a quick review of some of my initial thoughts of what I look for in a new video product, it’s not an in-depth demo or tutorial.

First, Let’s Set the Scene

There are two very popular video application used to create screen capture videos: TechSmith Camtasia and Adobe Captivate (formerly Macromedia Captivate aka RoboDemo).  While both of these applications can create screen capture videos, they do them in very different ways. Camtasia allows you to record your videos and edit it in a timeline format. Captivate allows you to record your video and edit in a slide-based format, with each slide having its own timeline. Captivate’s learning curve is much higher than Camtasia, but you can have more precision, easier editing and a cleaner output than with Camtasia, but the final format is Flash. You can always convert your Captivate video to any video format using 3rd party tools by exporting it to AVI (but who wants to go through all those extra steps?). Camtasia, on the other hand, is lower in cost, very easy to use and you can output in almost any video format you desire.

Now, the reason I told you all of this is to give you a basis on comparing Wondershare DemoCreator. DemoCreator functions more like Adobe Captivate than Camtasia. It’s a slide based format, so what you will see is going to be a little different than if you’re currently using Camtasia, or any of the free online video screen recording sites.

Using Wondershare DemoCreator

This software is pretty straightforward, not complicated at all.  You simply make your selections in each screen depending on what you want to do.

When you open DemoCreator, you will get to select the capture area, similar to both Camtasia and Captivate.

Your next step is to select the recording mode.  This is where you will see that DemoCreator is more like Captivate where you capture as a series of screenshots (my favorite because I’m a control freak, I guess) or full motion, like you’d do  in Camtasia.

Similar to both Captivate and Camtasia, you can choose whether to add narration or not. Then click the Record button and you’re off to record your video.

When you are finished recording, you can choose what you want to do with it. I like that DemoCreator is very intuitive up to this point. Even if you’ve never have done any type of screen recording before.

Here is the result of my choosing full motion recording.  As I mentioned earlier, the workflow for DemoCreator is slide-based. So you can see that it automatically divided up my recording into 3 separate slides of about 15 seconds each. This is fine and all, because it can make it easier to deleted unwanted clips.

However, it’s not possible to edit these slide clips as far as I know.  This was the same in Captivate so I can’t really complain.  Captivate did eventually create a tiny application called the FMV Editor where you can snip out parts of your clip and in the last version they built in that capability. This might be possible in DemoCreator, but I couldn’t do it and couldn’t find any information about it.  The way that DemoCreator handles that (and so does Captivate) is that it allows you to record more slides into your project. In Camtasia you would have to delete the erroneous part of the clip, record another clip, import it,  then split your main clip, then paste the new one in. This is a great benefit of slide based recording – you can move things around very easily.

The outputs of DemoCreator are Flash (SWF), Video (AVI, MOV, MP4, FLV, MPEG-2, 3GP and WMV), YouTube (MP4), SCORM compliant or EXE.

Things I Like About DemoCreator

• I can insert images and Flash animations
• I can combine full motion and screen shots in one project
• It’s lightweight and fast
• The interface is very simple, not a bunch of menus with 100s of options
• It’s task is focused – creating your video – not additional doohickeys to distract you like other products
• I can be a control freak so I’m able to edit my mouse movements in screen shot format
• It auto-creates captions that can be edited later
• I can add in interactive elements like text entry boxes, buttons and hotspots to build simulations (very cool!)

My Recommendations

Most of you will probably be familiar with Camtasia by TechSmith, so I’m going to base my recommendation for Demo Creator on that.

• If you’re thinking “Uh, what’s Camtasia?”, then I’m going to recommend you give DemoCreator a try. If you are ready to create videos, you might want to start of with DemoCreator because it’s a much lower price. This will give you a chance to see if video is something you really want to do. You can take advantage of their trial and play around with creating screen recordings of your screen.
• If you are “ok” at Camtasia, meaning you are able to create a video, but it takes forever and after hours of trying to figure stuff out, you have something you’re not really happy with, then I’m going to recommend that you do not try DemoCreator unless you are totally frustrated with Camtasia. I say this because the workflow is too different and it can get confusing to try to learn to do the same thing in two different ways.  Master Camtasia first, and if you find you want to experiment with other tools then give DemoCreator a try at that point.
• If you are “good” at Camtasia, meaning you can create video, edit it, use transitions and captions and publish it in a number of formats, then I recommend you consider trying DemoCreator.  It’s workflow is very different, but you should have a good enough grasp of Camtasia to recognize the differences and not get too confused or frustrated.
• If you are an “expert” at Camtasia and people come to you for technical advice to use it and to help fix problems with their videos, then I recommend you definitely try DemoCreator. It might be a nice addition to your tool box and allow you to create videos in a different way.

I, personally, like to have many options to choose from, so I will definitely be using this. I love using Captivate, but it can use up a lot of memory. I like using Camtasia because I can use the video editing features for movies from my video camera and publishing them to a number of formats.  DemoCreator is interesting that it fits right in the middle for me – I can do screen shot based recordings, but I can produce them in a variety of video formats. Currently in Captivate I can only publish as an AVI (unless that’s changed in the latest version).

Final Thoughts: I Heart DemoCreator!

Wondershare DemoCreator is an excellent, low cost alternative to some of the more popular screen recording software. It’s main function is to record demos and provide some interactivity – no other bells and whistles like it’s more expensive competition. One thing I would like to try is to use it on my Windows 7 netbook.  I probably could never run Camtasia on that thing, it takes forever for a YouTube video to play on it. But since DemoCreator is so lightweight, this could be a possibility for working on the go!