Capturing your Screen on Video to Create Tutorials or More
Have you ever wanted to capture things from your screen and share them with your friends either online or for projects?
Well, i often have.
I did know about a couple of softwares that do it but they were pretty steep. Camtasia Studio, one of the most well recognized names when it comes to screen capture is all that i had heard about.
Camtasia Studio costs about $300 so its worth investing in it only if you screen capture for a living and make HD Videos out of the same.
Then there is Snagit again by the guys who have made Camtasia Studio. It has some cool effects and features and costs $50. Its useful for people who have a budget and want to mess around a little with screen capture stuff.
I however, would love to do these things for free. There are 2 good online applications that i know of that can help you do the same. Unfortunately, they aren’t offline applications i.e. you won’t be able to create an MOV or AVI out of them directly (there are a lof of ways and means through which you can do that – or there will be very soon)
The 1st application is called Jing. It too is powered by the guys at TechSmith (the same guys who power Camtasia and Snagit).
The tool is pretty neat by itself. Its completely free to do a normal screen capture. Once you download the tool and install it, you get a little sun shaped icon on the top right of your screen and this enables you to go into the options. Once the video is recorded, you can upload it straight to ScreenCast.com (one more of those TechSmith properties).
- The Jing Project Interface
- The Jing Project Icon
The tool is pretty nifty and its also very sleek in terms of its design. One of the features that i particularly like about the tool is the fact that i can record my voice (if i have a mic on my PC) when i am recording the screencast. That’s great in terms of creating rough videos. There is no online audio or video editor however.
The other bad part is that because the video gets uploaded to screencast.com, there is no direct embed option which is sort of imperfect for sharing the video. The service thus is pretty restrictive in the sense that you cannot take the video outside to the web (and subsequently to your viewer) but have to bring your viewer to the video. There is YouTube export but that is only on paid accounts.
The 2nd (and in my opinion better) service that i found is called ScreenToaster.
Screentoaster is pretty much the same as Jing and a little more. It should be a lot more in a few weeks.
For Starters:
a) You don’t need to download any software
b) You get as much flexibility with video recording your screen as you want. Size ranges are a plently and customizable.
c) You can add subtitles after the video is done.
Record and Add Subtitles
d) You can also record sound over the recorded video. While there is no live recording as is in Jing (its coming), i find post recording a lot more useful as one can do a better, more focussed job.
e) You can embed whatever you have screencasted extremely easily. Sharing options are better as well.
- Sharing Options are Better
Unfortunately there is no live editing of the video or audio on screentoaster either.
They are coming out with a YouTube video export soon. Once that happens, you can download these videos as well.All about downloading YouTube videos in the next post!
ScreenToaster is a perfect acquisition target for YouTube. I hope Rudy Viard and the team get their due.
By the way, apart from tutorials, what else would you use Video Capture Softwares for? BeFoxy. Lend us some suggestions!
