Looking for opinions of why to go with Captivate over Camtasia for simple, basic application tutorials.

Captivate captures everything as 'screenshots' by default. It can do 'full motion' capture but the quality isn't great, it balloons the size of the file tremendously, and it's almost impossible to edit a full-motion slide.

However, screenshots are very easy to modify and edit and the overall interactivity aspects are much better than what Camtasia offers.

Camtasia always records everything as a movie, and does it very well - great quality, smaller size. But it's timeline and interactivity options are more limited.

IMO, Captivate is better for a true eLearning application. Camtasia is better for software simulation. Mixing them together can result in a very nice product.
Erik

I really like the captivate highlight boxes. With v3 you can now very easily fade out the entire screen except one area.

The zoom feature in Captivate doesn't work well, screen shot resolution is so small (to save size) the zoomed content distorts.

Whereas camtasia zooms in on small areas of the screen very well.

Over all I would agree with Erik - Captivate for true eLearning, Camtasia has a better feel for product demos if used for marketing etc.

However, in my expeirence Camtasia files also get fairly large as well.

Has anyone benchmarked the file size for a 10min full motion recording?

The files can get large, but once converted to Flash can usually save some space (at least, that has been true in my experience). Of course, the Flash files make it a breeze to distribute via inter- or intra- net. I also agree with the assessment that Captivate is better for interactive e-learning.

Elearning guild just did a great study on authoring tools. It does show Captivate leadership in this space, but with enough muscle, it seems both are capable, depending on your needs (IMO: Captivate seems more capable of delivering more robust interactions without too much muscling).