Screencasting is the act of making a movie of what”s on your computer screen and making available electronically (usually via the intra- or Internet). Making screencasts can help in a number of ways:
- You could record demos of software you own for sales & marketing purposes
- You could record demos of other software for review purposes
- You could record demos of software or processes for training & support purposes
- You could record demos of your all-time high frag score on UT2004 for bragging (or getting fired) purposes
Two free tools I”ve used are Wink and CamStudio. Both will let you record a screencast with audio, add some textboxes & arrows, and output a compressed SWF and HTML file for easy uploading to your web site.
Wink used to be missing audio and other feaures, but they just came out with version 2.0 that includes audio recording, the ability to plop textboxes & objects on your video, and other improvements. It”s easy to use and includes some tutorials on how to make your own screencasts. Wink works by recording a series of screenshots and tying them together as keyframes on a Flash movie. The upside of that is that images are clearer and filesizes are smaller, but Wink can”t record animation or other nuances. Wink create an EXE from your screencast (good for CDROMS or online casino those small cdrom business cards), uncompressed SWFs (for importing into Flash), and compressed SWFs for sticking on a web site.
Click here for a sample screencast made with Wink.
CamStudio is based on an open source release from RenderSoft (you can read the whole history on the CamStudio site). While both programs are easy to use, CamStudio is really easy to use because it”s simpler — optionally set a few settings (usually just Region->Region and the SWF/AVI toggle), just click a Record button to record, then click Stop to finish recording. CamStudio actually captures video and compresses it to AVI or Flash, so it”ll capture all the animation you need. The downside is that since it”s video, you”ll notice some grainy compression artifacts, and filesizes are much bigger (the CamStudio sample screencast I made was 4.9mb vs 1.2mb for Wink). Wink seems to have more features then CamStudio, although only CamStudio can convert your movie to an AVI file — handy if you want to upload your screencast to YouTube or burn a DVD for Uncle Joe to watch on his TV. CamStudio can generate AVIs using a number of codecs (DivX, WM9, etc) if they”re installed on your computer.
Click here for a screencast made with CamStudio.
I suggest checking out both tools. Each will work for most screencasts, although you may prefer one over the other for different things.
