Movies and Webcasting for Education with Picasa 3

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Google have released such a flurry of applications at the moment that it is hard to keep up. Because Google have a backlog of tools available for me to study I am probably neglecting worthy releases from other organisations. I need to clone myself and set my identical doyens to work (as I have been born with the defective uni-tasking chromosome).

One tool that I look forward to playing with is Picasa 3 (and Microsoft's PhotoSynth). I use Picasa a lot and find it a joy.  You shouldn't have to marvel at software being intuitive and non-fiddly so its hard to appreciate good software but Picasa is one such creature. A glance at Picasa's new features excited me a lot. It has some video-editing capability. It allows you to put video together from images (a la animoto) and then to easily upload your creation to youtube (Google trying to find some synergies in their vast stable of unprofitable companies it seems).  Another cool feature I noticed as the ability to take a screen grab from a video clip. Very, very handy.   The new face recognition technology for Picasa has also been talked about, perhaps to compete with the next generation technology of PhotoSynth. But I'm not getting too carried away by this yet. I want to see what Picasa can do for me for free that I was previsouly willing to pay money for.

Could Picasa do some of the things that Camtasia does? It certainy has basic static screen image capture (like Snagit) and webcam capture. Not screen recording that I can see but that could be in there somewhere. I will update this post as I dig into Picasa 3 more.