How to make a screen capture video
I have been struggling along trying to make the best of free software to make a decent video tutorial using a screen capture utility.
I use CamStudio which is free and a microphone attached to my sound card. The microphone I began with was something I bought years ago and it just didn’t give a good enough sound output, but I practiced with it anyway. I have now bought a new microphone which is also one to plug into my sound card, with a headset. It is slightly better. It is not radio quality. Some people who are using camcorders, video recorders and so on, plug a radio standard microphone into their recorders, not the sound card.
With CamStudio, I set the region to pan over a specified area of the screen. Capturing the full screen produces a video that no-one can see.
I muck around on the computer talking about the tutorial I’m making. The first one was simply about how to download psp tubes into PSP and how to make an avatar out of a tube and then how to make that an image with a transparent background.
After I have made the video which is in AVI format, I open Windows Movie Maker, which comes with Windows XP 2. I import the video I have made, fiddle around with it: that’s called editing, and save the movie as a .wmv file. There is no free software that I can find that will convert that to SWF or FLA, which are better formats because they keep the size of the movie more stable.
I then save that to my computer (takes an age) and those files are huge and upload them to YouTube and Idea 22. You can see the one I’ve done at YouTube, but the one at Idea 22 is currently being improved with the new microphone. Look back later!
Another method of saving the movie is to save to the DVD drive with a DVD recordable disk. Make sure you get the correct format here too. +R type is what my computer requires, but my other computer requires -R. This is for newer computers.
March 14th, 2008 at 6:54 pm
[...] It is rare to find a free screen video recorder so I thought I’d share this discovery with you. You can compare it with Camstudio. [...]