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Atomi's ActivePresenter captures and saves onscreen video and images and audio narration, but that's just the start of what it does. Another way to describe it is as a free tool for creating e-learning materials, manuals, presentations, screencasts, and demonstrations for training, education, business presentations, customer support, and similar applications. It's compatible with SCORM and handles a wide range of file types. ActivePresenter's free version is fully functional. It's also available in Standard and Pro editions that add features such as export capability, definable events, and Office compatibility. We tried the free edition.
ActivePresenter's user interface opens with a quick-start guide offering six choices: open an existing file or start a New Capture or Project on the control side, and License, Support, and Help choices on the support side. We clicked Help, opening an extensive PDF-based User Manual. ActivePresenter's New Capture and New Project wizards make this program easy enough to just start right up with, though, and we quickly snagged our desktop view, which the program displayed in its main window.
ActivePresenter's layout combines elements of word processors and graphics tools in look and layout, though with many unique, program-specific features such as a Timeline with a small but useful audio spectral display. ActivePresenter uses an expandable right-hand sidebar similar to those found in big-box graphics apps. The Slides sidebar is tabbed for Thumbnails and Titles. The program's View menu offers lots of Toolbar options, though, including the ability to customize the toolbars. In fact, ActivePresenter has enough options and settings to satisfy your inner nerd, everything from Mouse Hover options to slideshows to Ajax and Flash simulations. The Annotation menu has 11 options in itself.
While ActivePresenter proved easy to use at every step, we're not going to pretend that we turned out a slick e-learning package on the first go-round. But even simple projects yielded surprising results. Lots of well-thought-out touches like attractive, draggable cursor paths, programmable keystrokes, and test templates for multiple choice, true/false, and other methods save a lot of time without compromising quality. ActivePresenter does much more, though; users with still more needs can check out the paid upgrades.
Publisher's Description
From Atomi Systems:
ActivePresenter is a screencasting and rapid elearning authoring software. With fast, smart screen capture technology and a powerful authoring environment, ActivePresenter includes all the tools needed to record a presentation, annotate and easily convert the output to video (AVI, WMV, MP4, FLV), interactive AJAX and Flash simulation, or other document formats (PDF, DOC, PPT, XLS, HTML). Output can also be packed into SCORM compliant package to import and use in most Learning Content Management Systems(LCMS).
ActivePresenter reproduces your on-screen activity and records in video, sound, image or text formats within few minutes. Coupled with a powerful yet easy-to-use authoring environment, you can easily create advanced simulations, scenarios or online documentation just by operating on target applications and let ActivePresenter do the jobs for you. No programming or multimedia skills needed.What's new in this version: Version 3.7.2 hang up issue when reading MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 videos on some computers.
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All versions:
3.4 starsout of 14 votes
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Current version:
3.4 starsout of 7 votes
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My rating:
Write review
Results 1-7 of 7
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"Best of the free."
Version: ActivePresenter 3.7.2
Pros
I tried several free screen recorders and in terms of features and reliability, this is by far the best. Others have a much simpler interface, but also extremely limited features. I really like how straightforward the download info is, no gimmicks, no 'trial' ware, no bloatware, no other 'come ons', no nothing, just a great piece of software. ( I did a direct download from c-net but not using the c-net dwnloader). The options on this are enormous and you need to study a bit to get the full use of it, I don't mind. There are simplified instructions online.
Cons
Could be simpler to use but is a great offer for a free product.
Summary
The best of the free I've used.
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"Great - If it Actually Worked"
Version: ActivePresenter 3.7.2
Pros
Good feature set
Typical movie/screencasting UI
Free version features adequate for simple projectsCons
Frequent crashes (save often!)
Poor UI implementation
Feature set lacks finishing touches
Ultimately frustrating to useSummary
Hey, it's free. That is the best that can be said for this product. If I had to pay for it, I would be looking elsewhere. Atomi Systems obviously wants to hook you on the free version, then get you to pay for an upgrade - a valid marketing strategy, especially seeing that the free version is adequate for simple projects. But the free version, which simply unlocks (no re-install) to get the upgraded features, is a poor ambassador for selling the product.
It crashes often, sometimes on start-up. No other comments on this issue are necessary. Atomi needs to clean up their code.
Before starting, you need to select a capture profile. There are several pre-made profiles, and you can also create your own based on the pre-made templates. Unfortunately, the options are confusing and poorly described in the documentation. Some of the options, such as audible mouse clicks, are grayed out in some profiles, with no obvious reason as to why. Again, the documentation is of little help.
The mouse click option comes in for special scorn. This is supposed to create an audible mouse click in the soundtrack when you click the mouse to make it obvious to your viewer that a click has occurred. Unfortunately, this option simply doesn't work. I had to add mouse clicks to every slide by hand. (At least the option was there to do this, but it was tedious and should not have been necessary.)
The UI is typical and familiar for audio-video software. That said, the UI will frustrate you. Most items can be dragged and fully adjusted in the time window, but some critical items cannot. One of those critical items is the speed and duration of mouse cursor movement Such items are adjustable only by selecting the item in the time window, then entering the time desired (in milliseconds) using the properties window for that item. Gets the job done, but why can't it be done with the mouse like everything else? Needs work.
There are nice spotlight and highlight features, but again these will frustrate you rather than bring a smile to your face. The highlight can fade in and fade out. On the other hand, the spotlight, which is a far more dramatic effect, has no fade option. That makes this effect too jarring to use.
In the support forums, many people complain that full motion video capture has poor synchronization between audio and video. I can confirm that problem. I also encountered issues in full motion recording (FMR) mode with having my voice narration and computer sounds drop out momentarily or cut off completely near the time of mouse clicks (which helpfully break the project into editable chunks). Atomi's repeated answer is that your computer isn't powerful enough. If a core i7 can't do it, what can? I wound up recording my project in Auto-FMR mode, which is essentially a series of non-motion screen shots combined with mouse cursor animation.
This would be a great product if it worked well. Unfortunately, the frequent crashes and poor UI implementation make this a poor choice. It also suffers from poor documentation. The manual is pretty enough, with nice graphics and obviously produced at great expense. Unfortunately, it is poorly written and lacks critical specific information.
As an aside, the glowing review by the CNET editor is a joke. They obviously didn't try to use the product at all or they would have run into all of these problems, none of which are mentioned in the review. I take all CNET reviews with a heavy dose of salt for that reason.
If you absolutely have to do your project on the cheap, you can get it done with ActivePresenter. However, if you value your time, look elsewhere. -
"I have not attempted to use it."
Version: ActivePresenter 3.7.2
Pros
looks like the culmination of a lot of effort to accomplish this.
Cons
this turns out to be something other than I was looking for.
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"Adware/Spyware plus program didn't work"
Version: ActivePresenter 3.7.2
Pros
None that I saw
Cons
Adware/Spyware
Didn't workSummary
As soon as I started downloading this program using CNET's installer, both my browsers (Chrome and Chromium) started crashing for no apparent reason. Whenever I tried to restart my browser, it would crash again after a few moments.
As soon as the download completed, my browser started up with the spyware's welcome screen.
I finished installing ActivePresenter, started it up, chose my recording directory and the program crashed. Couldn't get it to start up again.
Uninstalled - all 3 (2 spyware). -
"Don't look anywhere else for a screen recorder."
Version: ActivePresenter 3.7.2
Pros
Heavy weight application, with editing options, multiple slides projects etc. And all is clear - I didn't have to read any manuals.
Cons
Didn't find any yet.
Summary
And it's free. really.
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"Fantastic for a free application!"
Version: ActivePresenter 3.7.2
Pros
Easy to get right into and start recording / editing. Controls were intuitive enough.
Video quality was stellar. No skips, high quality...
I didn't test every feature and only made one video but for a FREE program, how could you not love this?Cons
So far none!
Summary
If you're looking to record your screen, narrate what you're doing, perhaps make it interactive, and share the actions being performed on your computer - you can NOT go wrong with this application. I liken it to Screenflow (MAC) but the huge difference is the price. Free is good.
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"Excellent screencasting tool."
Version: ActivePresenter 3.7.2
Pros
Free version is more powerful than many other paid programs.
Very easy to use.Cons
Program hanged on me a couple of times.
Summary
Excellent program , specially since you can do a lot of things with the free version.
Results 1-7 of 7
