15-Minute Reviews :: DemoCreator v1.5.5

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is DemoCreator version 1.5.5 by Wondershare Software – An application to aid you in creating screen-based demos.

Please note version 1.0.0 of this title was reviewed previously. Click here to read the previous review.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Wondershare DemoCreator is a professional screen recording tool to create better-than-live software video tutorials, presentations and training courses. It records the screen activities and shows how the application and system works with tips.”

Quick Pros

• Interface is simple overall
• Application now records keystrokes as a video slide
• Lots of elements to add to slides
• Timeline control functionality great for building/editing
• Undo/Redo now exists as keyboard shortcuts
• Audio narration useful generally
• Watermarking function now available though confusing

Quick Cons

• Could be expanded to record video for mouse movements
• Audio narration should be incorporated into timeline editor
• Would be nice to be able to add a background audio layer for music
• Help file is irritating with constant requests to install language

Expansion

This application has gone through a few changes since I last tested this application, expanding and growing. Many of my concerns from the last review have been addressed, and just a few other observations added.

Overall, the interface is very easy to use and easy to get around. The layout is fairly intuitive, with project buttons along the top, the slide list on the right, slide elements on the left, and the timeline editor at the bottom – The preview/editing pane is front and center to this. People with even a minimal or no knowledge of creating a demonstration can find themselves quickly and easily making a new project easily and quickly.

The first step to most peoples’ creation of a demonstration will be recording their screen actions to expand on. As I mentioned in the last review, this records screenshots for mouse movement and then converts your mouse movements into animated movements is good for those of you who may be uncomfortable with your mouse movements or uncomfortable about fumbling around. It may be a downfall for those of you who may be animated in your mouse movements, in that you couldn’t do such things as ‘circle’ items, point other items out without clicking and otherwise. Something new to the process here is previously, the application did not previously record keyboard clicks as you typed; Instead, the text would appear the next time you clicked the mouse. This has changed; Any time you type now, there is a video captured of the process. The recording process is simple and easy to get your movements into the application quickly and easily. While the application does now support short video recordings for keystrokes, I’m not quite sure why this can’t be expanded as an option for the mouse movement as well; It would be nice to see the option for either way, or even allow for the change on the fly inside the application.

Once you have a working slide set, it is very easy to manipulate the slides using the timeline editor and the slide elements available. You can manipulate quite a bit, including mouse positioning (Make it look like you clicked in the middle of a button for example, instead of the side to prevent confusion), slide lengths, element positioning (including in the timeline) and their length and much more. There is a good amount of options for building your slides. While at first I did not see the addition of undo/redo functionality (No buttons, no menu or otherwise), I decided to try the keyboard shortcuts again, and did find that undo/redo do exist as Control-Z and Control-Y.

Adding audio narration is available two different ways; First, you can add it while you are recording your mouse movements by selecting the options during setup of the record, or you can click the Audio button while viewing the slides. While it is great to have here, the one aspect I do wish for is instead of having the audio treated as a separate entity to the video/slides, I would like to see it become part of the timeline control itself, or at least allow for playback of the audio within the timeline display so that you can adjust your slides to your audio easier than having to time your voice to the slide, or going back and forth to the timeline editor to adjust the timing.

While I did not find the watermarking function last time, I did find it this time; However it is not clearly marked. Labeled ‘Logo’ under the elements bar on the right, when you add a logo, it will add it to all the slides at the position you choose. While it does not appear translucent on the main window, when you process a preview or publish the final file.

While I was hunting for information on the watermark function and if it existed in the helpfile, I was unpleasantly bothered every time I chose a new topic by the ‘Language pack installation’ window for the Chinese Simplified pack. I’m not sure why this is so invasive like this, but you will find you’ll likely want to either install it if you’re looking through the helpfile, or click on ‘Never install any language packs’ (Either option are likely not a great choice). I did find the watermark function in the helpfile, but it wasn’t named ‘Logo’ there, it was named ‘Master Image’.

Final Verdict

This application is expanding in the right direction, though it still could use some improvements in some aspects as well. For free, if you do plan on creating a demo any time soon, I would recommend grabbing this title as since it does work reasonably well and produces nice-quality files that you will likely be quite satisfied with. The price of the full version seems to have dropped from $99.95 to $69.95 ($59.95 for an academic license) with a special price for those who look to upgrade in the future from their Giveaway of the Day version of $49.95. For $69.95, this is not a bad application at all, considering most of its competition is in the range of $100 to $200 (and more).

If you’d like to read the review of DemoCreator 1.0.0, click here.

Posted by BladedThoth on Wednesday, November 28, 2007