Camtasia Relay 4 To Improve Captions, Add YouTube Publishing
TechSmith has revealed details about a forthcoming update to the company's lecture and screen capture system, Camtasia Relay 4, this week at the Educause conference in Philadelphia.
Camtasia Relay is a lecture capture and presentation capture suite comprising a server and a recorder component that can be used on Mac OS X and Windows systems for capturing video, audio, and materials displayed on screens. The system provides recording, editing, captioning, and search capabilities and offers LDAP integration and support for encoding in multiple formats, including MP3, MP4, Flash, and Windows Media, for publishing to a variety of destinations, including common learning management and content management systems and iTunes U, among others.
According to TechSmith, the forthcoming 4.0 release will add new video recording capabilities that will "enable users to capture video of an individual lecturing and [embed] that video along with written course material. The result will be a recorded lecture or presentation that includes the speaker alongside her or his written presentation materials. The recorded lecture can then be viewed any time by students with a variety of devices."
TechSmith said the new version will also include "fully automated, one-click publishing" of captured materials to YouTube. It will also add a new user role, called "Global Caption Editor," that will allow people other than the faculty member who created the recording to receive notifications when videos have been uploaded to the server and then review and edit captions for those materials remotely.
"Camtasia Relay is currently being used in over 100 courses at West Virginia University and has been extraordinarily valuable for students and faculty," said Eric Coffman, manager of application development at WVU's Robert C. Byrd Health Sciences Center, in a statement released today. "In a recent poll that we conducted, 86 percent of our students said they use recorded class lectures as a primary resource for studying, and 93 percent of those students attribute their improved grades to these videos. Camtasia Relay's new features will continue to help students learn new material, and make the recording and publishing process even easier for our professors."
Camtasia Relay 4 is expected to be released this fall, though TechSmith has not announced a specific date for the full rollout. Nor has new pricing been announced. Pricing for the current release, Camtasia Relay 3, is a one-time fee based on the number of simultaneous encoding supported. For education customers, the license fee for version 3 starts at $4,995 for single and up to $14,995 for seven simultaneous encodings. Multiple server licenses and optional maintenance agreements are also available.
Additional information about Camtasia Relay can be found on TechSmith's site. The company also offers free trial downloads of its software by request.