screencasts

TipCam got the basics of screen recording right with its medium-glossy freeware beta, and it has a few tricks all its own. You'll be able to start, pause, delete, and preview your screencasts from the small recording controls window, even draw on annotations while you record. Brilliantly, if you press the hot key to zoom in, the zoom window will follow your mouse until or unless you lock it in place. Unfortunately, the TipCam control panel doesn't do so well. If you're not careful, it might inadvertently star in your screencast. After you become familiar with the … Read more

The straightforward, sunny Jing Project is one of the easiest ways to grab and share screenshots and videos straight from your PC. The interface, half a lemon yellow sphere, sits at the top of your screen, waiting for you to hover over it to begin capturing the image or screencast in a crosshair.

You'll be able to annotating images and review videos, but copying, saving, and sharing them is what Jing is really about. Version 2.0 adds a useful Help Center and lets you configure new buttons that will upload your creations to Flickr, an FTP account, or … Read more

TechSmith raises the bar with version 6 of Camtasia Studio, which was released Wednesday. While the essentials remain the same in this feature-stuffed software for creating and producing screen recordings, a few well-placed adjustments and capabilities make their mark in creating overall faster screencasts.

Among the changes, support for high-definition (Blu-ray) video, independently editable audio and video tracks, and time-saving hot keys are the most critical.

The ability to produce HD-quality screencasts (for the Web and mobile phones) is cool for those with HD computers, but on the technical side, the HD-friendly format (MPEG-4 AVC format with H.264 compression) … Read more

On Wednesday, YouTube unveiled the winners of its help video challenge. Last month the company offered users a chance to get their how-to screencast featured as the default video on the service's help center, giving fledgling screencasters the opportunity to get more exposure and a larger following.

Among the clips chosen are short how-tos on adding video annotations, creating playlists, and digging deep into YouTube's settings to get videos to automatically play in high-quality mode. Ironically, this video, along with the tutorial on creating subtitles, has YouTube's overlay ads, which in the case of the high-quality how-to … Read more

The team behind the screen-recording utility Camtasia have released a simplified, experimental version of the technology, packaged into a nice downloadable application for Windows and Mac called the Jing Project.

Jing makes it very easy to grab screenshots and videos straight from your PC, and then save them or share them on the Web. The coolest part of this experiment--in theory--is Jing's integration with Screencast.com, a hosting service for videos recorded off your computer. Once you've recorded a video, you can save it to your Screencast account, and from there you can get an embed code to … Read more

YouTube isn't the only way to share video, and it's certainly not the way to store and share professional screencasts with hiked-up bitrates. After 18 months as a beta mewling, on Wednesday, TechSmith's Screencast.com graduated to a full-fledged release.

Version 1 of Screencast.com continues to receive screen recordings produced in the freeware Jing Project (for Windows and Mac) and premium Camtasia Studio, though it's available to anyone willing to register and pay for storage. It has come some distance from the site covered by Webware.com as part of a July 2007 review of … Read more

Have you ever made a screencast? A screencast is when you capture and record all the action that takes place on your desktop so you can view it as a movie. Many people use screencasts for presentations and instructional videos for software, though there are many other uses. Sometimes you probably wish you could make a screen recording for less computer-savvy friends and family so you wouldn't have to have those exhaustive phone calls: "No grandpa, I said Save the file...no...SAVE it."

I found a program for Mac today that makes creating screencasts easy. It'… Read more

With all his computer experience, Power Downloader gets a lot of calls and e-mails from friends and family who want advice with computer issues. Always happy to oblige, Power tries to find the easiest way to explain how to use various types of software and computer functions, but sometimes words alone are inadequate for complex computer tasks.

To make his explanations a little easier, Power Downloader found a program to make simple screencasts. Screen2Exe lets Power make little demo movies so his friends can see exactly what he's talking about. Screen2Exe leads him through a step-by-step process to record … Read more

Screencasting is not for everyone. Most of the options out there are fairly full featured, but it's hard to find a good, free solution that can do as much as some of the pricey professional tools such as TechSmith's Camtasia Studio (download) or Adobe's Captivate (download). A new service that launched this week called uTipu (download TipCam for Windows) is stepping into the ring and offering up a Windows-only (for now) one-stop screencasting service that combines both a software tool to grab your onscreen action, along with an uploader that will send it off to uTipu's server farm for YouTube-like Web hosting. The hope is that anyone who wants to make a screencast or two will be able to download the app and get going without too much of a hassle, similar to what TechSmith's been up to with its Jing Project (download for Windows or Mac).

Like other software-based screencasting tools, uTipu's got a few tricks to get your screencasts looking right. You can set it to record your entire screen, or just a small section. It can also follow your cursor, and highlight what you're doing with a little translucent yellow circle. There are recording controls to pause and stop the action, as well as an annotation shortcut in case you feel like drawing on the screen John Madden-style. For audio and voiceovers, there's no post-production workspace, so you have to record your narration at the same time as the video and hope you don't make any mistakes.

Advanced users get some nice tweaks, such as VNC server setup to record screens on remote computers, and frame-rate quality controls to bump up how smooth your videos look. The one caveat is that higher frame rates also increase your file size, and uTipu's only serving up 250MB of free hosting for the time being, but about a minute of medium size video at 15 frames per second runs at about 3MB, which means you'll be able to create and send about 16 videos at the five-minute time cap. If you're close to running out of space, you can also skip the option to upload to uTipu's servers entirely by uploading them to any video hosting service that accepts the FLV Flash format.

On the whole, uTipu's off to a good start, but by not providing some post-processing tools to clean up your work, it's not offering a whole lot more than what you can get from its formidable competition, such as the zero-install Screencast-o-matic, and the cross-platform Jing from TechSmith.

I've embedded a sample of a user-created uTipu video after the break. As you can see, it's nice and big, and you can actually read the onscreen text. My less informative one can be found here.

… Read more