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?