Thursday, February 23, 2012

Catasia Studio : Screencast Software Review


If you are looking to create computer based video tutorials or demos to promote your products and applications then the easiest way to go about it is by using a screencast software which captures all the actions going on on your computer screen and directly renders it to popular video formats which can be used in just about any which way you want.

Though there are a large number of free online and offline screencasting options available on the internet, it is quite likely that if you are trying to produce a video with any degree of professionalism then you would want to use a paid screencast software, and sooner rather than later. Here is a look at one of the more popular paid screencasting software, Catasia Studio.


Features I Like About Camtasia Studio 6
Intuitive User Interface
Camtasia Studio uses a very user friendly interface which is so intuitive that you hardly ever need to consult the help files, which themselves are are pretty comprehensive albeit compact. But to help you master the software better you can also download or stream short tutorial videos from their website.


Zoom-n-Pan
The Zoom-n-pan feature gives you great control over the camera angles (such zooming in to a particular section of your screen) and is very handy in just about any tutorial as it allows you to focus in on the relevant part of your screen in every single shot.


Caption
Caption is a very basic feature and present in most screencast software. It basically allows you to add subtitles to your video and is a very handy feature as it will almost invariably increase your audience.


Call-Out
The Call Out feature allows you to add various kinds of "boxes" inside your video during post processing and maybe used for a variety of purposes such as highlighting text, drawing special attention to a part of the screen  or to simply blur out sensitive information from the screencast.


Drawback of Camtasia Studio 6
I had just two issues with my Camtasia Studio 6 software:
  1. It is slightly difficult to get the aspect ratio right in order to get the maximum possible screen area for your video. Further, if you are using captions they too tend to eat up quite a bit of screen space.
  2. The Youtube version of the rendered videos often turn out to be of a slightly lower quality than expected as per the preview.
 Pricing of Camtasia Studio 7
The latest version of Camtasia Studio available is Camtasia Studio 7 and it is priced at a marginally expensive $50 for the individual license and also offer a host of different licensing options.  

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Make Money from Product and Movie Reviews


Out of the several ways you can make money on the Internet, one of the easiest and most popular is by writing product reviews. Most review sites are free to join and offer either upfront or residual payment for reviews you write for them. The following is a list of the most popular websites that pay you for your reviews:

1) Review Stream: Review Stream is one of the few websites on the Internet that accept international members as well as pays upfront. Set up with an aim to pay for every review published with them, it is one of the best places to earn substantial money on the net. They accept reviews of almost everything and anything under the sun, ranging from books to softwares to local restaurants.
The amount they pay for reach review varies between $1.25 to $2.5. Apart from that they buy slightly inferior reviews at a bulk rate, which is the normal rate divided by five.

2) Epinion: Epinion is another major player in this industry but unlike Review Stream they only offer a passive revenue sharing for your reviews. They encourage you to write reviews on products available on their store and a percentage of the sales made by them is distributed amongst the authors. This does not mean that you cannot write a negative review on Epinion as they pay you even for negative reviews.

3) Ciao!Ciao! (Not to be confused with Ciao.com) is another major website dealing with reviews and is probably powered by Bing!. However they do not accept international members. Ciao has specific websites for different countries such as Ciao.co.uk for the United Kingdom, and Ciao.it for Italy. If you live in any of these countries then I can assure you that Ciao has one of the finest revenue-sharing policies out there.

4) Softwarejudge: Softwarejudge accepts reviews of only softwares. For every review published on their site that pay you a minimum of one dollar but it might go up to as much as $50. However the cash redemption process of Softwarejudge is slightly troublesome and you’ll probably have to write quite large number of reviews before reaching their payment threshold of $100.

5) Squidflix: It is a subsidiary of Squidoo and is dedicated solely to movie reviews. You simply need to choose a movie, decide whether you love it or hate it, write hundred words about it and Squidflix will do the rest. It will display Google Adsense and Infolinks(optional) advertisements on your Web page (or lens as they are called). Apart from that you can also easily integrate Amazon and eBay modules and earn through referrals by displaying related products available on Amazon or eBay.

6) Shvoong: Shvoong accepts reviews of all most all forms of published text ( such as books, news etc.) as well as websites and movies and the site pays 10 per cent of the revenue generated from your reviews.

7) Gomolo: It is probably a subsidiary of Shvoong and specialises in Indian and especially Hindi films. Its revenue-sharing policies are same as Shoovng.
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