Snagit 13: Conversation with Chris Larson

Chris Larson is the Technical Product Manager of Snagit. He joined the TechSmith in 2007 as a User Experience Designer and brings that focus on users to his role on Snagit. He works with a very talented and passionate team that is dedicated to making our customers lives easier with by helping them communicate visually. Chris is a graduate of Michigan State University with a background in Digital Media Arts and Computer Science.

In this conversation, Chris discusses the new Snagit 13

Geetesh: Snagit 13 is considered to be a major upgrade with a cleaner interface, video captures, and so much more. Chris, what are your favorite new features?

Chris: GIF creation definitely takes the cake for the new feature that I use the most in Snagit. A regular part of my day is helping out customers and getting feedback from our beta users, user test participants, or customers from our forums. And when I show someone how to do something in Snagit or need to communicate a usability issue or bug to our team, I want to quickly and succinctly demonstrate it. Video has been great for that in previous versions, but sometimes it's just too much for a couple simple steps. So, I'll start by taking a quick video, trim and cut out the parts that aren't relevant, and then make it into a GIF. I personally need to be efficient, but I also don't want to waste the time of our customers or our team. With GIFs, I can make my content easier to absorb and view.

Panoramic capture is pretty amazing as well. I use it occasionally for those hard to capture apps like Excel and grabbing a page or two of a chat history. It's been great for capturing maps as well when you want to capture a map that's larger than your screen.

Another thing we've done in this release is make is easier to customize Snagit. Everyone works a little different, so we encourage users to make Snagit work for their needs. In my role, the name of the game is being efficient, so I enjoy the time savings I get from customizing Snagit. My main workflow is to capture an image, add some arrows and text to get my point across, and then send it to where it needs to be. I've created a couple presets to help me. This isn't necessary a new feature, but it's definitely been exposed in a new way.



I use the Print Screen button when I just want to do a capture that I'll copy and paste into a document or web app. But I'll use Ctrl+Shift+2 or 3 when I want to sent directly to Screencast.com and paste the link into a team chat. That way I have a stored version of it up on the web that I can easily reference anywhere.

Geetesh: There are plenty of features to do with the Animated GIF. How has this old format made a comeback, and what tricks does Snagit perform with Animated GIFs?

Chris: We've definitely seen a dramatic resurgence of GIFs. A lot of it has been fueled by fun applications in social media obviously. But it's also has a place in your work. They auto-play, auto-repeat, and they are short enough to get a couple steps across without the need for too much text in an image or a long voiceover in a video.

Pro-tip: When I have to communicate multiple issues in a certain area of Snagit, I'll also take a longer video and then use the playhead selection to create multiple GIFs from sections of that single video. Pretty nice time saver.

We have supplied you with several presets to adjust the file size and look of your GIF. But you can also tweak the settings as much as you’d like.

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