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 with Jing's visual, low text-density design.
Jing 2.1 adds buttons to export the capture to Camtasia or Snagit.
(Credit: CNET)After capturing a video or still, Snagit and Camtasia Studio users can export the clip to either of Jing's sister programs. Techsmith, the creator of all three, offers a 30-day trial for Snagit and Camtasia prospectives to give either a try. After taking the capture, click the program icon to continue editing the video or still using those premium tools. In addition to sharing captures with yourself, you can add toolbar shortcuts to push captures to any Screencast.com folder you've set up. In Jing 2.1, you can further let Screencast.com visitors comment on your captures.
As usual, premium users get the most impressive addition. Subscribers to the $15-a-year Jing Pro can now record from their Web cam, and toggle between recording from the Web cam and from the screen. For more details and video clips, read the Jing blog here.
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 and TiVo. Likewise, it's been adopted by YouTube, which makes a separate encode for each file for Flash players and hardware that run H.264 clips. This means that going forward your screencast may end up being able to be watched on a wider range of devices.
On the export front I'm a little surprised TechSmith is offering such a simple way to offload captured videos to third-party hosting sites. It's really nice, but will no doubt cut into potential revenue from people who might have paid the extra cash for the company's video hosting sister product, Screencast.com. This service has a higher cap on its file size (2GB up from most service's 1GB max), but limits how many people can watch your content to 2GB of streaming video.
In addition to the launch of Jing Pro, TechSmith put up a new support site called the Jing Help Center, which has a handful of how-to videos and support documents. This is available to both free and pro users.
Download Jing (via CNET's Download)
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.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
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 Jing Project. Webware editor Rafe Needleman had remarked that
"the well-established Screencast.com site is the weak link in the chain. It's unattractive, and the links you need (the embed codes) are nearly impossible to find. Plus, after 60 days, the free trial service expires--so don't get hooked if you can't stomach the $6.95-a-month fee for screencast hosting."
A lot has changed since then. Screencast.com's makeover addresses most of these critiques. In addition to a revamped interface, said Dirk Frazier, Screencast.com's product manager, in an interview with CNET, "we've moved from what was a very confusing workflow to a polished workflow."
Clicking "Share" pulls up URLs and embed codes you can copy to the clipboard.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Though still simple, Screencast.com's UI is intuitive and pleasant to behold. As a new addition to version 1, a details dialog springs up with each newly created folder. A portlier Help Center features a new design with improved search and deeper answers to common questions. Similarly, a new Tools page lays out links to TechSmith tools, like a media uploader for desktop videos and the MediaRoll embed widget that shares folder content for public folders.
The navigation buttons along the left remain useful for executing uploads and managerial tasks. Clicking an entry in the visual file system similarly offers up intuitive icons to open, edit, delete, or share the recording. (P.S. Clicking "share" is one way to get at those embed codes.)
Screencast.com's developers have also been sweating over back-end changes, like adopting a multiserver architected back-end that can bear more visitors and their recordings. Over the past six months, Frazier added, "lots and lots of improvements have been made on the data center side."
Fans of the service can expect more, too, in the upcoming months. Frazier's blog shares a snippet of Screencast.com's technical road map that includes H.264 encoded playback and social tools to "create a conversation around your content." "Oops," he writes, "that might be too much sharing."
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.
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The team behind the screen recording utility Camtasia have released a simplified, experimental version of the technology, packaged into a nice downloadable application called the Jing Project (download).
This blob is the Jing UI.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Jing makes it very easy to grab screenshots and videos straight from your PC, and then save them or share them on the Web. For me, 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 put it in a blog or other page.
The experimental Jing is great, but oddly, the well-established Screencast.com site is the weak link in the chain. It's unattractive, and the links you need (the embed codes) are nearly impossible to find. Plus, after 60 days, the free trial service expires--so don't get hooked if you can't stomach the $6.95 a month fee for screencast hosting. What I'd really like to see is a quick and easy way to upload Jing files to YouTube, Blip.TV, Viddler, or other free sharing sites. That would kill part of TechSmith's revenue model, though.
If you need to do serious screencast editing, the full Camtasia product is worth looking at. And, of course, you can grab graphics from Windows without any download at all (shift-PrintScreen). But for a clean, flexible, and almost fun way to grab pictures and onscreen videos, Jing really can't be beat.
Update: Chris Pirillo raised a good point via Twitter: Jing has less than no YouTube support. It produces Flash SWF files, which YouTube doesn't read. That's a colossal omission in a video product these days.
The following video was made, of course, with Jing.
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