The Visual Lounge lets you find out about TechSmith behind-the-scenes. Watch screencasts and videos from other customers, meet up with your fellow TechSmith users and staff, and get more tips and tricks!

This week's Screencast of the Week comes from Carsten Cumbrowski of the Search Engine Journal. You can click here to view the screencast.

Carsten created a simple animated GIF showing off some of Google Maps new features. There's no audio. I liked this screencast because it was a great reminder that a screencast need not be complicated, long or even narrated to be effective.

I need to do more short screencasts like this for the blog.Carsten makes great use of the highlight cursor option in Camtasia Studio Recorder which I think is very useful for screencasts at smaller dimensions. Otherwise the cursor would be hard to follow on such a small video.

And, it looks like Carsten used his Camtasia Studio screencast with Adobe Image Ready to make the animated GIF (Note: Camtasia Studio can make Animated GIFs too).I think that's one of the benefits of using Camtasia. Since Camtasia creates videos in industry standard file formats, we don't lock you into just one file format.You can use your Camtasia Studio content with other programs as well.

Click here if you'd like to learn more about Camtasia Studio's highlight cursor option or click here to learn about the Animated GIF output.

Any nominations for next week's Screencast of the Week?