screencast

Anyone interested in producing professional-looking movies and demos from the computer screen needs some quality screencasting software, and TechSmith's Camtasia definitely fits the bill. This app strikes the perfect balance between powerful tools and ease of use.

Considering the relatively minor boost in version number, Camtasia offers quite a few feature updates. The program now includes the capability to record system audio, as well as automatically resize windows during recording. Plus, you get the option to "smartfocus" on key frames and add closed captions to your presentation. Additonally, the app offers speech-to-text with a voice training feature; … Read more

Snapz Pro X is one of the most popular applications available for screen capture on the Mac, helping you quickly record both still images and movies of anything that happens on your screen. This app gives you a lot of flexibility for image and video capture, allowing you to select certain objects, an area or window, or your entire screen--and you can automatically save the capture in various formats, with extra settings like watermarking, color depth, scaling, and frame and data rate. A live preview also lets you tinker with screenshots before saving them. Recent updates have added support for … Read more

Not long ago, my uncle enlisted my help on a project he was conducting through the hospital where he works.

His task: to create a tutorial that would be used in an ongoing training course for other physicians. My uncle is a neonatalogist, chemist, and hobbyist beer brewer, but no video producer. Furthermore, there was little budget for his leg of the undertaking. He needed simple software to capture mouse movements on the computer screen--in the end, the freeware TipCam saw him through.

TipCam isn't the only screencast software out there, and it certainly isn't a one-size-fits-all solution. … Read more

When it comes to producing professional-looking movies and demos from your computer screen, TechSmith's Camtasia Studio continues to strike the right balance between a powerful toolset and ease of use. Version 7.1 adds even more features without making the app any more complex to use.

The feature-packed screencast app--which includes HD production settings--does have a learning curve, but the user-friendly interface and front-and-center icons for most-used tools go a long way toward lowering the intimidation factor a notch. Plus, TechSmith povides a useful online help center that includes several video tutorials that do a nice job walking users … Read more

The just-launched Screenr product isn't the only easy Web-friendly screencast tool out there, but among the competing products I've tried, including ScreenJelly and Jing, it is the best option for creating screencasts fast and getting them posted immediately. All you do is let the Java-powered recording app load from the Screenr Web page and hit a button to record a screencast of up to five minutes.

Screenr's special power is its slick Twitter integration. As with TwitPic and TwitVid, once the service collects your media, it posts it on a page for you and can send a … Read more

What began as a freeware project to easily share basic screen captures and screen recordings has grown into a solid application and capture distribution system with a premium component. Jing's attractive application takes a sound, simple approach to capturing; begin by dragging the crosshairs to define your capture field and then take a still or start a recording. When you're done, save it to your computer or upload it to Screencast.com (operated by Jing's publisher), an FTP site, Flickr, or YouTube (for a premium). If you've got Snagit or Camtasia Studio, TechSmith's premium programs … Read more

The freemium screen capture and screen recording application Jing received an update on Tuesday that adds new video functionality to paying users, and a few other enhancements for all Mac and Windows users.

Two hotkeys now help Jing's capture crosshairs snap to common aspect ratios. Press Ctrl to maintain a 4:3 aspect ratio and Shift for 16:9 widescreen proportions. While locked into a ratio, dragging out the crosshair shows you boundaries for common screen measurements within that ratio that you can easily snap to, like 320?240 or 640?480. This is a nice addition in keeping … Read more

We don't do too many screencasts here on Webware. But when we do, my personal favorite is Telestream's Screenflow. It's a nice app, but it's Mac-only which means I can't use it when I'm on my office PC. In keeping with the mission statement of this blog, worth a look is software-free alternative Screencastle. This Java-based tool will record a select region of your screen and any audio from your computer's microphone. It then hosts it for you, complete with download links so you or your users can download a local copy for … Read more

On Tuesday, TechSmith released Jing Pro, a paid premium version of its free screen capture and casting software. The new service, which runs $14.95 a year, upgrades videos to H.264 encoding, takes off the Jing watermark in the bottom corner of recorded clips, and gives users the option to upload directly to several popular video hosting sites including Facebook, YouTube, Viddler, and Vimeo.

Of the news, one of the biggest changes is the move to the MPEG-4 AVC video format. It's the go-to format for iPods and iPhones, as well as set-top boxes like the Apple TV … Read more