These days you need to be on the cutting edge to get noticed in the online world. Take podcasting for example, it’s not enough to have an audio podcast anymore, you need an enhanced podcast with slides or screenshots to go with your audio. Better then that you need to be making video casts with video to go with the audio. Other then using a digicam or iSight to capture your video, the best alternative for the podcaster that looks like me is to motion screen capture your review or demo product. With the Mac platform we are very lucky to have the king of screen capture available to us, Ambrosia Software’s Snapz Pro X 2.0.

Sure, there’s a lot of great programs available for the Mac to capture your screen shots, heck, even OSX has the built in screen capture capabilities. But when you want to have as many options open to you as possible for screen capture and you need to capture full motion and sound from the OSX desktop or an out mic, the king is clearly Snapz Pro X. Ambrosia says, “Think of it as a digital video camera for your screen. Snapz Pro X makes short work of making training videos, producing product demos, creating tutorials, archiving streaming video, and anything else you can think of.” I couldn’t have said it better. Looks look at some of the features and more:

Screenshots: Snapz Pro X supports saving screenshots as .bmp, .pict, .gif, .jpg, .png, .tiff, .pdf, or Photoshop files, with precise control over image compression. Screenshots can be scaled, cropped, color depth-changed, and dithered. Snapz Pro X can also add borders, generate automatic thumbnails, overlay watermarks/copyright notices. What makes Snapz Pro X special is the Live Preview function. It shows you exactly how your screenshot will look before you save it to disk. This allows you to change border styles, scaling, cropping, and other settings on the fly. Instead of guessing what your screenshots will look like, you can get them right the first time. Once I learned how to use this feature it saved me a ton of time re-doing and tweaking my captures.

Movie Captures:You have the choice to capture your movie in exactly the frame rate you need. Plus you can capture a specific window by just clicking on it, or a selection by just drawing it. You can capture menu drop downs and even DVD movies playing on your desktop. If that wasn’t impressive enough, I captured video iChat conversations and expose moves along with user switching screens. You can video capture iTune visuals and screensavers. If it happens on your screen, you can capture it. The only way to believe it is to see it, check out this page of demos up at Ambrosia Software’s website.

The Snapz Pro X 2.0 version is $69.00 with the movie capture, $29.00 for the regular version with just the screen capture. In this day and age you need to do all you can to impress the boss, or your customers. Even if you want to send movies for instructing your friend how to use iTunes to subscribe to the MacReviewCast, Snapz Pro X 2.0 is the must have application.

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