Camtasia is a great program for recording any on-screen activity as a video. It can capture activity and save it in many different video formats, including Macromedia Flash (SWF and FLV), AVI, WMV, QuickTime (MOV), RealMedia (RM), animated GIF, or alternatively as an executable (EXE) file.

A wide range of effects is available to enhance your movie, including text boxes and transition effects, and you have total control over elements such as audio and video codecs, quality, frame rate, color depth and special effects.

The Studio consists of a Recorder, Producer Effects, MenuMaker and Player. Used in sequence a movie can be created, edited, produced and distributed with extreme ease.

It is even possible to record your own audio narration to a video, either during or after the recording process.

The program is so simple to use, that you can begin recording your own videos within a matter of minutes.

Version 4 added support for sharing your video with just about any hardware device, from a mobile through to an iPod, publish your video through Screencast.com, reduce or even remove background noise from your recorded video and even more customisation tools.

Version 5 adds better recording capabilities and the SmartFocus utility for automatically adding pan and zoom to projects. An autosave function prevents work from loss in the event of problems with the computer.