Camtasia vs Descript: Which is a better fit?

Jonathan L.: Hi, I'm Jonathan from Love Experience, and I'm an experience strategist. I think I rate Camtasia five out of five. I used to create training courses using a mix of different tools on my Mac, mainly QuickTime for trying to record the screen and then threading all those captures together in iMovie. It was kind of assembling multiple parts, and overall the screen capture was pretty poor quality. When I was looking for a tool to create the training courses, I really needed a combination of a powerful screen capturing tool, but one that could also capture the webcam and have really good control over the microphone because obviously voice quality and training is really important, and I went through a number of different video programs and Camtasia is the only one, which kind of did really brilliant screen capture, allowed you to select the separate kind of audio imports and didn't require a technical degree in video capturing to do so. When I started using Camtasia and made that kind of switch from the combination of products I was using before, there was quite a lot of tutorials provided by the company and they were pretty practical to run through. And the actual ability to do the capturing is really simple, how you can select the particular screen. I got multiple screens in my setup. I could select the audio interface, I could see kind of what was going on and then all of that capture on the timeline. Initially it looked kind of a bit difficult, especially I wanted to do some kind of alpha masking and things that possibly more advanced. But there was a really great amount of short videos. I don't have the time to go and read a thousand-page PDF or attend lots of live training. There was these really nice short videos that allowed me to learn how to do that manipulation, get it applied to my course, and basically get onto exporting it and get it up onto the various training platforms that I use. When you're looking at setting up Camtasia and starting to use it within your business, I think a really great investment to make alongside the software is a professional quality microphone. Whether that's using a separate kind of plugin USB audio processor or one that just plugs in direct to USB. In Camtasia, you can select the input. You don't need to mess around with any other audio software. It's all dealt with on the timeline. If it's a single mono input, you can just mix it down. It allows you to manipulate the sound. All of that kind of detail is what changes it from looking like a low quality webinar to a more high quality done at home studio production. And I think there's a few really simple things like for many people be recording this in the home office. I think putting some strategic pillows in the corner rooms to reduce the reverb, all those small things that really add up to a much higher quality finished product using Camtasia.

Guy: Hello, I'm Guy. I am the founder and director of a small consulting firm, less than 10 people, and I would give Descript five out of five. So we use Descript for editing video content, specifically podcasts that we record with video. We will annotate it and get captions for that. Sometimes take the text out, but most importantly, we make short YouTube shorts, basically clips of the entire video, or shorter one minute video clips to go on social media. What do I like most about Descript? There's so many features that are great, but mainly it's the ability to make these small clips and to upload them to YouTube, to put front screens, end screens on them, fade in, fade out, automatically add the captions. But yeah, in a nutshell, making quick clips very quickly without having to have lots and lots of editing and podcast production knowledge. What do I dislike about Descript? Sometimes I think I need a bit more time on the tutorials and learning, but sometimes the really technical parts of editing a video, and shortening it, and taking words out are difficult. But actually, I probably just need to spend some more time on the tutorials, on the training.