I'm a freelance developer, but a couple of months ago, one of my customers asked me to make some screencasts of the product we're building. I tried Camtasia an

I'm a freelance developer, but a couple of months ago, one of my customers asked me to make some screencasts of the product we're building. I tried Camtasia and Adobe Captivate on Windows. Camtasia has been best to work with, although it has a couple of pretty horrendous bugs that require nonobvious workarounds that took me a while to learn. On the bright side, it has a great set of online video tutorials (duh) and it's easy to do transition effects and record from Powerpoint. The other commenters are right -- the hardest thing to do well is the voice-over. You need a good mic -- USB digital mics are probably best, but I've gotten by OK with a good headset. You also want a quiet place -- digital "noise removal" post-processing makes me sound like the Predator. One day when I was at a shared office, I spent the morning standing in the bathroom, recording audio to my laptop. It's also vital, of course, to have an engaging script and a product that's interesting to watch. Writing and filming the screencast will force you to concentrate on these things from the perspective of a new user, and you should take that opportunity to ferret out any needless distractions.