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What about SCATE Ignite?

I’ve just dowloaded the trial of Ignite Pro and have watched the tutorial. Honestly, I was out trying to find a Camtasia alternative because — after a month of use, i’ve run into many bugs and some snotty and inept helpdesk assistance at Camtasia.

Here’s what I found:

  • It can’t do video screen capture and is really more like Adobe Captivate than Camtasia Studio. It does the whole “smoothly gliding arrow” deal like Captivate.
  • You have to do a compile in order to preview (unlike Camtasia). Big Pain.
  • It can do quizzes and email the results to you.
  • It does publish in all the formats that Camtasia does AND ALSO in MPEG, which Camtasia doesn’t. Score one for Ignite.
  • It’s player is a funky, pop-out deal. Not very user-friendly.
  • It only has two (very large) output sizes, so it really isn’t designed for producing web video. This is a very problematic factor of this software.
  • No sign of audio or video editing as is available in Camtasia (albeit to a limited degree)

So, unfortunately, I’m back to “bug-dodging and workarounds” with old Camtasia Studio … for now.

If you know of a viable Camtasia alternative, PLEASE let me know by commenting below.

5 Comments

  1. Ignite Product Manager

    Just a quick response:

    Compiling is necessary because we don’t shoot the screen as a movie, so all of the elements (screenshot, arrow position, text and audio) need to be “assembled” to create the output. Admittedly, compile times could get long in older versions, but we did release a new version about a month ago that reduced the compile times by up to 95%, so they are not very noticeable now. In any case, we pay this price to keep everything as individual slides so they are easier to edit later.

    The player is getting reworked as I write this, so the user controls will be much more up to date soon. October 11 to be exact.

    Ignite is not for audio or video editing, it’s for assembling existing content in to presentations, etc… Of course you can add videos to Ignite content, and you can add audio, but they must be finished products before they are added to the presentation. We leave audio and video editing to other tools that do it just fine. No need to reinvent that wheel.

    In any case, stay tuned, and speaking of Oct. 11, watch this site go live! http://www.ignitecast.com.

  2. marathon

    @IPM: Thanks, I’ll be interested to see the new site next month. I have an additional question about Ignite: When you say it can “email the results of a survey”, do you mean that it uses the client email or can it send the results invisibly, via the server?

  3. Ignite Product Manager

    Pops the client email, and populates it. Too many setup variables to worry about at corporations to be able to send invisibly, ESPECIALLY at corporations.

    The new site will track all of it in an online session though.

  4. marathon

    Thanks. I’m using Camtasia and feel that I’m getting a lot of dropped surveys because of this, but I don’t know how to test that theory because I can’t open a link in a new window.

    Any ideas on that?

  5. Ignite Product Manager

    Now it’s live beta! http://www.ignitecast.com.

    Beta will end in about a week, but most all of the functionality is up and running now.

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