Showing posts with label screencasting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label screencasting. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 01, 2007

AllCapture - Screen Recording Software Inspired by Adobe Flash

Balesio, developers of Turbodemo, have introduced a new screencasting software called AllCapture 2.0 that provides a pretty solid post-production environment for editing your screencast recordings.

If you have ever worked with Adobe Flash (the authoring environment, not the Flash player), you know that Flash uses the concept of a visual timeline to show the content of a movie over time in layers and frames.

You can turn-off layers to hide some object (like an image or sound clip) from stage, group similar layers in folders, extend the display length by adding new keyframes, tweak animation and more.

screencast-frame-recording [Screen capture of AllCapture Screencast Software - Notice the TimeLine]

AllCapture frame-by-frame screencast editor is something like Adobe Flash tailored for screencasting. Objects (sounds, images, text captions) are arranged as layers which can be further grouped into folders. Even the Timeline layout in AllCapture 2.0 is remarkably similar to that of Flash authoring tool.

When you record a new desktop movie in AllCapture, it's added as to the Film layer while the mouse or cursor movements go in a separate layer. This is such an excellent feature because you can visually select and disable the mouse cursor in frames. Every single frame that has motion or animation is shown with a black solid dot making it extremely easy for educators and trainers to polish their screencasts and trim the boring parts.

And like Windows Movie maker or other video editing software, you may add transitions and video effects between individual frames to make your screencasts look more professional.

A 30 second 640x480 video recording of a web browsing session resulted in a 7 MB MPG file. Not bad. The software costs around $129. [Don't have the budget, try Jing from TechSmith.]

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Wednesday, July 18, 2007

TechSmith Jing - Free Screen Capture with Screencasting Software

TechSmith, developers of SnagIt and Camtasia Studio, today released a new screencasting cum screen capture software that works both on Mac and Windows XP / Vista. And this is probably the first product from the TechSmith headquarters that's completely free.

Jing is designed for instant computer screen movies and image captures - a small yellow bubble floats on edges of your desktop - hover your mouse over the bubble and click the capture button.

download jing techsmith

You can select any rectangular areas of the screen, decide whether you want a static screenshot or a movie, and hit the record button - the graphic is saved as a PNG image while the movie will be saved as a SWF Flash file. During the record process, everything else is dimmed which I think is a very good design.

You can either leave the recording on your hard-drive or upload them to Screencast.com via Jing itself. [Screencast.com is like the YouTube of Screencast videos]

The most useful feature of Jing is history (quite similar to Plasq Skitch) - every movie or screenshot captured via Jing is always accessible through the history window as a thumbnail. Deleting a capture deletes it from your History as well as Screencast.com if it has been shared.

While the Jing installer is a mere 4 MB, you have to installed the .NET 3 framework to use this sofware (and that weighs around 28 MB.)

Jing Project | Jing blog | Thanks Betsy | Screencasting Fans on Facebook

If you don't own Camtasia, you can consider Jing for creating short screencast videos in Flash which can then be embedded in blogs or shared online through Blip.tv (yes, Blip accepts Flash files).

While there are no hints if Jing will always remain a free utility, it does signal that the Mac Screencasting community may soon be blessed with a Mac version of Camtasia and SnagIt.

Related: Screencasting Software Guide, Screen Capture Software

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