Musings: Exploring screen recording options

Some years ago, in a burst of Internet marketing enthusiasm, I purchased Camtasia, a product that allows you to record your screen as you navigate through with a voiceover. But I never got around to doing anything with it.

 Sometime later and now I needed a video tour of my site. So I decided to look at the available options and work out whether Camtasia was really the best option for what I wanted to do. Lots of people had lots of suggestions. So here is what I discovered.

First I followed a few dead ends:

  • Profcast was my first lead. But Profcast is more for recording powerpoint presentations or podcasts.
  • SnagIt sounded great – but it is just for static screen captures.
  • Screencoder turned out just to be something written by some anonymous guy with lots of support complaints as far as I could see.
  • XVidcap is an open source alternative but it only works with Linux systems, no go.
  • Screenflow seemed liked an effective and cheap option but only for Macs.
  • CamStudio 2.0 is an open source alternative but it only outputs to avi and I was wary again of support issues.
  • vNc2WF was a free alternative for capturing what you are doing on the screen but you had to add the audio later which was a pain for what I was doing.
  • Windows Media Encoding has a recording feature but output is only as a WMV file.


So it came down to 3 options:

Captivate (by Adobe for around $600)
Camtasia (by TechSmith for around $300 – but I’d already bought it anyway)
Jing (also by TechSmith for free!)

<My thoughts after exploring these options are:

  • If you are looking for interactivity, quizzes, keyboard shortcuts, highlighting text, being able to print out slides, then Captivate is for you. Of course there is a trade-off for all this functionality, file sizes are big. But this is a great product if you want an interactive demo or a training experience.
  • But if you are interested in something like a product tour (which is more what I was after), Camtasia is the better option. Although it doesn’t have the same level of interactivity available (for example you can do a quiz but can’t get feedback on your results instead the answers are sent to a lms or email) there is a huge amount of functionality. You can spotlight part of the screen, have background music, zoom in, choose the output size of the screen, record audio during the screen recording or add it later, use a web cam to insert a speaker, zoom in to part of the captured screen, edit and trim video easily, and you can also have clickable flash hot spots which take you to a certain section of the video or to an external web page.
  • Another benefit of Camtasia over Captivate to my mind is that you can output to lots of different formats whereas with Captivate you can only output to swf (which you can’t upload to places like YouTube etc).
  • The other thing I like about Camtasia is that the recording is all happening in real time. If you want to have the screen still while you talk about a feature that is what happens. But Captivate works differently. It only takes screen captures as the screen changes, so it is capturing a series of screens each containing a mouse click or significant mouse movement. But adding audio is much more cumbersome. Many users have reported problems adding audio and trying to synchronise the audio recording done later with the images or taking the time-consuming path of adding audio to each slide/section. 

So my path seemed clear. I had made the right choice in Camtasia. My $300 had not been wasted after all. 

I started creating my tour. It was relatively easy to learn and after all I did not need lots of special features, this was just to be a straightforward tour. After quite a few attempts I finally got a version I was happy with. I chose a viewer/player size and uploaded it. Despite the fact that the tour was less than 5 minutes long the file size was almost 20MB. It took so long to load the video (in fact I gave up waiting a number of times). So back I went to the drawing board. I made a shorter version. But it was still a couple of minutes long (if it takes less than 60 seconds to do the tour then there is probably no need for a tour!). It was still a huge file. So then I tried reducing the size of the viewer. It still took too long to load (and was too small to see).

The problem is that there is a lot happening on the screen and constant changes. This means a much larger file size. If you are filming someone a plain background and a person who doesn’t move too much will take much less file space then one with a changing background and lots of movement as the screen has to keep changing all over rather than just making incremental changes.

My next option was to use TechSmith’s hosting service Screencast.com. But it was not cheap and you are charged on bandwidth. Well with 60 schools of 500 kids that is 30000 potential users, I could be served with a hefty bill especially as I had no idea how much use the tour would get. I didn’t want to take the risk.

It looked like it was time for Jing to step up and be counted.

Why did I have to be so thorough and explore all options? Why didn’t I just go straight to Jing? I can see why so many people recommended it.

This is what I like about Jing:

  • Jing is incredibly easy to use (the hardest part is the installation which takes awhile as you have to install Microsoft.Net as well). Click on the sun, choose your screen section and away you go.
  • Jing gives you 2MB free space on Screencast.com. So with Camtasia (made by the same people as Jing, they released Jing in 2007) you pay for the product and pay for Screencast.com. With Jing it is free and you get 2MB free space on Screencast.com. Go figure.
  • You can also save the video on your computer, on your server or send to flickr etc.
  • It is a very user-friendly piece of software it is hard to stuff it up. The creation of the product and the uploading is integrated making it a very seamless process.
  • You can send people the link where the video is or you can embed onto your web page.

So why is TechSmith giving Jing for free when it is so great? Well it is not perfect…. I guess the theory is you’ll like Jing but then say but gee I’d really like to do this this and this so the next natural progression is to purchase Camtasia.

Here are my problems with Jing:

  • You can’t resize the screen to be viewed. If you recorded it as a 400×300 picture it will be displayed as 400×300 which is a pain when you are recording full screen but do not really want to display as full screen. Videos can only be viewed in the dimensions they are recorded.
  • There are no keyboard shortcuts to start recording, pause or stop recording. So you have the mouse at one end of the screen and you are ready to finish but you have to see the mouse being dragged down the screen towards the stop button.

Some things that bother other people (but are not an issue for me):

  • Maximum length of the video is 5 minutes.
  • The video ends with the Jing logo.
  • No real editing facilities if you don’t want to do it all in one go.
  • You can’t add sound later.
  • Only output is swf.

But for my purpose, Jing was fine. My only concern is what happens if you go past the 2MB bandwidth per month limit. Does the video just stop showing? I have put a query in to tech support but no reply yet.

So my thoughts are. See how I go with the existing video in terms of bandwidth. If it is a problem, reduce the video size and track the usage. If I can get a handle on the usage then I can decide whether it is viable for me to open a paid Screencast.com account and advance to the extra functionality of Camtasia.

 

PS. One last thought. Your recording is only as good as the hardware supporting capture. I have one laptop where the fan whines and another where it loads the web pages really slowly. Not ideal for screen recording. And despite trying a number of microphones, even the expensive ones do not give perfect sound quality. Plus when you live in a small apartment where traffic noise and even the noise of the lift start to intrude on the quality of the recording you realize how a professional recording studio would make a world of difference. Plus I bet they don’t have two cats meowing and hurling themselves at the door because they are desperate to know what exciting things you are doing in there with the door shut!