>I'm looking to create some video files (via screen recording), on average 2-3 minutes in length.
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>I looked at a trial version of Camtasia several months ago, and wasn't as impressed as I thought I'd be. I had a few lock-ups with it, and even when it did work, it took a significant amount of time (and local disk space) just to create one short sample video.
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>Maybe Camtasia has gotten better - just curious if anyone has tried it, or competing products.

I've used Wink - http://www.debugmode.com/ - the freebie was just enough for what I wanted. It's got some minor glitches, like forgetting the font settings between shots (I did my stuff with callouts), but I got around it by selecting all images in the end and setting fonts then.

The freebie doesn't support sound, and it actually gives you a Flash movie and generates a webpage to show it. Unless you want to show motion in real time and not the simulated mouse movements, this is great.