Windows Screencasting on the Cheap
I’m the tech/operations person for a branch of our organization that has staff in 3 locations. I work out of the “main office,” and do a poor job of making it out to the other two locations on a regular basis. Partially because of the location spread, and partially because I think it’d be fun, I’m going to start producing some demo/instructional screencasts. I know, this is completely unique take on screencasting that no one else is doing. Maybe I should patent it. (please note the thick sarcasm) I’m tied to Windows at work, so I looked first at Camtasia. Being cheap I balked at the price tag. That started me looking for free alternatives.
I read something a couple of weeks ago about a “free” Windows-based screencasting setup. For the capture George suggested using CamStudio. I’ve played around with it a little, and I’ve been very impressed with the simplicity and general quality of the capture. CamStudio’s captures are fairly large, so George took a suggestion from Free Vlog and used Windows Movie Maker to achieve better compression — and convert the AVI file to WMV.
What other options are out there? I’ve read about Wink, but haven’t tried it yet. What do you use for Windows-based screencasting?
- Published by jason in: Tools Windows
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2 Responses to “Windows Screencasting on the Cheap”
#1
¬ Carm Scott
April 3rd, 2007 at 5:27 pm
That’s great that you are going to put together some screencasts. That’s something I’m interested in doing for my users too, I just haven’t dived in yet. Camstudio and Wink are the two free tools I hear about a lot. I haven’t tried either one yet, but I wish you the best of luck.
I have collected some web links on the process of screencasting and thought I would share them with you here in case you find them helpful.
Beth Kanter – Screencasting Primer
http://screencastingprimer.wikispaces.com/primer
Bill Myers Top 10 Tips for Creating Effective Screencasts
http://www.bmyers.com/public/1107.cfm
Jon Udell – Screencasting Tips
http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/02/22/screencasting-tips/
O’Reilly – What is Screencasting
http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/lpt/a/6119
#2
¬ Alan
April 4th, 2007 at 9:03 am
I’ll probably be flogged for this, but how about Windows Media Encoder 9? (Version 9 is the latest MS has.)
I messed around with it, and if you customize the capture resolution, framerate, etc. settings, it seems to do a fairly decent job. Also will capture audio, though I didn’t test it.
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