For short videos, you can use the free Jing from the same company as Camtasia, Techsmith.  Camtasia IS a pretty decent program, but agree that it's overly expensive, especially if you are not using it in a professional capacity, and just to produce helpful videos here.  Since I have training as one of the parts of my IT Support/Web Design company (http://technicalrs.com), I am fortunate to need this software there, so the expense makes sense.  But I still use Jing surprisingly often for how fast it is to record something and instantly share it without any complexity at all.  Shame you are limited to 5 minutes, but carefully planned, that may be enough to get your point across.
 
As for running at the same time as Sonar and doing both together, it can be a little bit difficult in some circumstances.  If you are trying to capture audio being recorded and played back through your normal Sonar sound card, you may have to fiddle around with drivers and/or cables for a bit to get it all right so that you don't have any feedback loops and that you can do both at the same time (i.e. not having to worry about driver sharing).  In my case, I setup a separate output on my Layla 3G to back into my on-board sound card, so I use the Layla for Sonar, then control the output of that to the "soundblaster-clone" for the Camtasia side of things.  It works, but can be a bit of a pain to setup the first time 9and subsequent times if you don't record a lot - you'll be reinventing it many times).
 
Hope that all helps.

Hi, guys. Still watching this thread but spazzing around the apartment/intertubes today dealing with stuff. Just stopping back to thank everyone for the extremely useful suggestions. I look at all options/suggestions. I've been slacking off lately in regards to replies though which I always seem to make unnecessarily lengthy and I've been frying some unusually large fish which this post is directly related to. I'm also a little concerned that I may not be able to post here without calling Cakewalk due to the new Single Account weirdness that is tripping me up so just know every single post has been helpful and I've tagged them as such. I'll be back with some comments/questions as the day allows. Cheers.
 
Also... hello, Mr. Bapu. You stay awesome and weird. We're all counting on you. ;-)

I looked at the stuff you mentioned last winter, for the videos I'm doing.  I ended up getting Bandicam for about $40 and Sony Movie Studio Platinum, which is the light version of Vegas, for about $100.  I also use Handbrake to convert the files, which mentioned above also, is free.  Handbrake is invaluable for compressing, when uploading to YouTube or similar.
All the software has been working great but I notice a slight color change in Bandicam captures.  It does great with the HD resolution and since I'm mostly doing Sonar screen captures, the slight color difference isn't really an issue.  I've also used Bandicam to just capture the audio on videos, which is quick and easy to do. 
After getting everything set with the formats, resolutions, etc. ...it's been working like a champ.

BTW, unless you're REALLY getting into video compilation, Sony Studio seems to be about 90% of Sony Vegas...  kind of like Photoshop elements is to the full blown photoshop.  That last 10% I probably won't ever use or currently have the knowledge to use as well.

I'm starting to scratchpad a starter plan as to how to approach this so I can experiment and learn the ins and outs of it all before committing to anything specific as I would hate to make a mistake that involves money.
 
The Jing suggestion intrigues me despite the 5 minute limitation because although I do anticipate needing to record longer videos than that as I cut my teeth and learn about video files, audio routing and more external concepts (like writing scripts as to what I want to say and the like). It would also force me to learn how to splice clips together. I need to dig up that copy of Premiere I have laying around but I also learned this morning that Premiere 2.0 is supposedly available for free download and I could use that for editing. I would however need some kind of conversion software to compress the files because apparently that version doesn't have the new codecs (or whatever it's called) and I would run out of hard disk space very quickly.
 
As far as audio I guess I can over dub most things and splice it all in in an editor later. Like script/time everything out as I create the vid then do all the talking after the fact from a script sheet and then synch that up in premiere/Sonar. Then in the meantime I can sort out quality live audio while recording the vid for things like tweaking effects and the like.
 
Complicated stuff but for now I'd better just start testing otu programs and poking around at what they all do. Goodness me... I'm stepping into a whole other world of complexity aren't I? lulz

Try this - http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/   $15/year or a free version.

Note: With Jing, there is no editor built in, so unless you want to use an external program to do it, Jing won't do ll you need.  Like I said, it's great for quick videos with no editing required.  The Camtasia editor is pretty decent, though it's no Adobe Premier, it does well for the purpose of screencast videos.

.

Nvidia cards only...
http://www.geforce.co.uk/...-experience/shadowplay

CakeAlexS
Nvidia cards only...
http://www.geforce.co.uk/...-experience/shadowplay

not sure what you're trying to convey...but see what Sony has to say about what cards can be utilized with their software.  HUGE discussions and I think the verdict is still out for version 13 on both Vegas and Movie Studio.  IOW, they don't have a recommended card(s) yet listed on their specs, like they have on previous versions. 

Cam Studio is free:
 
http://sourceforge.net/projects/camstudio/