Saturday, July 12, 2014

How to Become a Great Screencaster

CamStudio Review


Cam Studio is a screen casting program that has a free software gives videos in an AVI format. It can also convert these AVIs into Flash Video format, embedded in SWF files. Cam Studio is written in C++, but Cam Studio 3 will be developed in C#. Sometimes you need more than a still image from a screen. For cases where you need to show on-screen actions—for example, showing a tech-support specialist a sequence of actions that results in an error—you can turn to one of these inexpensive screen recorders. Cam Studio is a free software that uses AVI format. But you can also convert movies to Flash (SWF) files without spending a penny. Like some of the other best things in life, Cam Studio gives you flexibility. It lets you choose from a number of codecs and offers an auto-adjust setting for the frame rate; you can also set it to capture frames every 5 milliseconds up to once per minute. By either entering coordinates or dragging the mouse, you can select a region of the screen to be captured or just choose to capture the whole screen. Cam Studio also offers sound recording with interleave capability, and an auto-pan feature makes video recording follow the mouse cursor. The original Cam Studio was released as an open source product by Render Soft software in October 2001. The source code license was converted to the GNU General Public License in December 2002 with release 1.8. The Source code of versions 1.0, 1.4 and 2.0 are still available at Source Forge. In 2003, the company was acquired by eHelp Corporation who owned a competing product called Robo Demo (now called Adobe Captivate. eHelp Corporation was released and updated version as Cam Studio 2.1 under a proprietary software license only and removed the ability to create SWFs. A succession of acquisitions led to the company being owned by Adobe. Cam Studio is a free software to use and no cost to it. I’ve never used Cam Studio before even though it’s free. You can also record audio from your speakers or microphone, although I did not test this feature. Screen annotations allow you to add custom text captions and callouts to your movies. These annotations must be saved as a layout prior to recording and can be called up with a hotkey during the recording process. Cam Studio does not offer editing capabilities, so your movie and annotations must be carefully planned before you begin recording. AVI movies can be quite large, but by converting them to Flash format the file size is reduced considerably. The conversion process is somewhat slow, but generally worthwhile for the size reduction.

If your needs are fairly basic, Cam Studio is a handy little tool for recording screen activity and audio in AVI and SWF format. And you can't beat the price; it's free. Screencasts are those videos depicting a shot of a computer screen.  There are many applications for such a program such as tutorials and software reviews.  It is also often used to record video chat conversations.  There are quite a few tools for creating screencasts.  Today I would like to review another free screen casting tool that has actually been around for awhile.  It’s free, good at what it does and offers several key features.

The purpose of this article is to review some of those key features. So, buckle in and come along for the ride and see if Cam Studio is the tool for your screen casting needs. I will touch on 4 different key features. When you try Cam Studio, you will see that there are also other features and I think you’ll be pleased with them, but for the sake of this article I will be focusing on 4 key features of this free screen casting tool. Screencasts are those videos depicting a shot of a computer screen. There are many applications for such a program such as tutorials and software reviews.  It is also often used to record video chat conversations.  There are quite a few tools for creating screencasts.  Today I would like to review another free screen casting tool that has actually been around for awhile.  It’s free, good at what it does and offers several key features. The purpose of this article is to review some of those key features. So, buckle in and come along for the ride and see if Cam Studio is the tool for your screen casting needs. I will touch on 4 different key features. When you try Cam Studio, you will see that there are also other features and I think you’ll be pleased with them, but for the sake of this article I will be focusing on 4 key features of this free screen casting tool. Cam Studio allows you several different options when it comes to the region of your screen being recorded.  Choose “Region” from the Region dropdown menu and upon clicking Record, you will be able to draw out the square area you would like to see recorded.  Choose “Fixed Region” and you will be able to enter numbers indicating position and size of the desired screen recording area.  Choose “Full Screen” and the whole screen will be recorded. You also have the option to turn on autopen which will allow the recording area to follow the cursor around. Cam Studio also gives you the ability to add screen annotations, little memos, speech balloons, arrows, etc. that can be added to a screencast to bring attention to areas of the screen.  Creating the annotations is quite simple but there is a bit of a trick to adding them to the screencast.  Don’t worry; we’ll go through it to make sure it isn’t all that difficult. Camtasia Studio is one of the most popular screen-capture recording applications; however, it costs around $299. No doubt, Camtasia Studio a robust platform to record online video and includes a lot of functionality, but not everyone can afford it at that price. Therefore, CamStudio is a great alternative for creating online vids, especially for those who are just venturing out into the world of online video creation.

 

 

I've personally used Cam Studio since late 2009 and have enjoyed using this free screen-capture software to capture on-screen video recording. On this web page, I will share my experience using Cam Studio and show you how to effectively set it up to get the most out of this versatile video-making application. You will also see some examples of videos I've created using this free application. With the need to have the best software for your computer increasing, there’s no wonder there’s an overflow of downloadable programs for screen recordings, including Cam studio and Apowersoft Free Online Screen Recorder. Cam studio is an open source of screen casting for all-screen and audio recordings on Windows computers. This means that the only people capable of benefiting from this program are those with Windows XP, Vista, or 7. In this case, anyone who owns a MAC or Windows 8 PC will not be able to use this wonderful program, which poses a major need for an alternative to this software. On the other hand, a few of the cons include its compatibility dilemma, one full shot screen capability, and SWF video viewing troubles. All of these are consistent complaints made by frustrated customers. In addition, many customers complain about its fussy setup process, handle complications, and beyond reach of HD videos. Though many of these issues are tedious to the users, they make the experience less worth attempting. The best alternative to Camstudio is Apowersoft Free Online Screen Recorder. This software is similar to camstudio in the fact that it is free and anyone can use it without time limitation. However, when Apowersoft Free Online Screen Recorder is compared to Camstudio, it has a clear edge in the following parts:

    No setup process
    Run on Mac
    More recording mode
    Better quality in recording video and audio simultaneously
    Record audio separately
    Take Screen shots
    Edit while recording

A few of the pros to having this software like cam studio on your computer include its convenient free pricing, it’s ability to assist with the makings of high quality instructional tutorials and presentations, as well as its anti-aliased screen captions. The program offers user-friendly and effective features for internet marketers. It capitalizes on one of the hottest trends in internet marketing video today: screen capture. When you present a screen capture video, you are showing viewers exactly what you are seeing and what you are doing on your screen. A simple resource I have made for students on how to use CamStudio. This is a free piece of software that can be used to record whatever is happening on the screen and has a variety of uses for both teachers and students across the curriculum. Some of the CamStudio alternatives have been listed for users who wish to explore other options for the purpose of making screencasts. Screen recording software come in extremely handy for multiple purposes like creating demos, presentations, video tutorials and much more with absolutely no hassles. The program in question can capture audio as well and lets you make use of your webcam for a picture in picture effect on your screen grabs. And the AVIs you record can easily be converted to bandwidth-friendly SWFs, a feature that proves to be of help when you wish to share them on the web. In case you are looking for utilities that can carry out all of these functions and more, then here we have some of the most efficient ones. Camtasia Studio allows you to record interactive and engaging videos of software, PowerPoint presentations or even video games. The developers claim that it produces smooth-flowing clips and one of the key highlights of the program is that it lets you edit them or personalize with photos, music or other videos. You can make use of the green screen effect for superimposing yourself or carry out simple operations like crop, copy and stitch. Furthermore, you can record audio, while capturing the screen and make use of the webcam for the picture in picture effect. By default, the application records in the full screen mode, but you can customize the area of the window you wish to capture. The next option on our roster featuring programs like CamStudio is said to be one of the easiest screen recorder and screen capture software designed for Windows. All you need to do to capture everything that can be seen on the monitor is hit the ‘screen capture’ button and the program does the rest. On the website, you will find a button to launch the screen recorder and as soon as you hit it, the program begins to record the screen as well as the accompanying audio. As it needs a web browser, you can use it on computers running virtually any operating system. And what’s more, these clips are perfectly compatible with select mobile devices like iPhones. You do not have to shell out a single penny for it. You can also add screen captions to the video recordings and you can even personalize your video. CamStudio also comes with its own Codec which produces high quality audio with smaller file size compared to other popular codecs. You can have complete control over the video output. It is possible to use custom cursors to record the full screen or a part of the screen on your desktop and you can also reduce or increase the quality of the recording. CamStudio comes with a built in help file so you can use the help feature to get the answers that you need about CamStudio. CamStudio is completely free to download for personal as well as commercial projects. This software can be downloaded from The CamStudio website. http://camstudio.org/ It is very easy to install CamStudio Software. Download the software from CamStudio website indicated above. Once the binary file is downloaded, follow the instructions given below to install CamStudio.

    Double click on the downloaded file.

    Then you will get a small window with a security message "The publisher could not be verified, Are you sure you want to run this software". Click on 'Run' button

    Then the Welcome screen of the Set u wizard appears as shown in the slide no.2 of the attached power point presentation

    Click on 'Next' button. You will then asked to read the License agreement. Select 'I agree the agreement" and click 'Next' button

    Now select the destination folder to install the software

    The next screen shows whether you want to install full, partial or custom installation. You select what ever you want

    Click 'Next' in the next screen. then it will ask for creating desktop icon. If you want desktop icon, select the check box and then click on 'Next' button

    In the next screen click on 'Install' button. Once installation is completed, click on 'Finish' button. that is all. I started using CamStudio as a "no cost" alternative for adding video demonstrations to online Help to accompany complex written procedures. It is an excellent tool. I also had to escalate the use of this open source software product through our corporate software standards group to get our company's approval for use. That was a real learning experience... However, now that I'm using the product, I have discovered that many of our customers do not have workstations equipped with sound capabilities, so I have been forced to use the text annotations instead. I have found it to be a very cumbersome process. I would love to see the CamStudio evolve into something a bit more featured in this area. We'll give it to you straight. You won't find a zoom feature, a huge variety of compressors or file types, or a video editor in the free CamStudio 2.5 (beta). What you will find is a small, sturdy screencast app that faithfully records your PC in AVI and SWF (Flash) formats. There are many fine features in the intuitive, open source app to recommend it, including an option to highlight the cursor path during a recording session, automatically pan, and record with sound. A brand-new effects menu scoops on the ability to annotate and append videos with comments, a time stamp, and a territorial watermark. Just don't get too crazy all at once. There's clearly a long way to go for CamStudio to catch up with commercial rivals--most grumble-worthy is the lack of file type support outside AVI and SWF files and the absent editor for trimming, splicing, and optimizing a video. If those aren't strong concerns, this freebie, with its steady playback and modicum of audio and video settings options, will provide the necessary tools for creating quick demos and screencasts. I'm a long-time developer but I am relatively new to A/V recording. I think of a codec as a driver that sits between a capture device and the target file. If the codec supports some feature like a certain fps setting then that's translated to the file. But I don't understand how closely that relates to the codec that viewers need to see the file. I look at that like compression where there are a ton of options like zip, rar, etc, and image types like gif, jpeg, png, etc. - and we all know that the application that opens these files needs to use the same format as the app used to create them.

What I don't understand is how universal some of these codecs are. My first attempt at using the CS codec resulted in a "write-only" file because the target system didn't have the CS codec. Unlike FLV, AVI, WMV and other file types, I think it's asking a bit much to ask people to install the CS codec to view files. So I see this codec as only being used to create material that will be consumed by people you know. DivX and Xvid are very popular among people who create vids, but I'm not sure how universal they are among typical user/consumers. I don't want to have to tell people to download the DivX codec (run the installer, don't install the player, and ignore the offer to install a browser toolbar...). I can edit files created in CS using Windows Movie Maker. That creates a WMV which is fairly universal for Windows users anyway, but with this I'm concerned about file size and quality. CamStudio is similar as Camtasia with the screen casting production. System sounds need to be captured via Stereo Mix from the "Record from Speakers" dialog at present. Stereo Mix gets its signal from the analog speakers, so those have to be the default device for playback. To get system sounds AND preferably microphone together into recordings:
Presently that has to be accomplished via a kludge performed with Stereo Mix as the default recording device, analog speakers as the default playback device, and with the microphone's "listen" tab selected, the "listen" box checked, and the output sent to the analog speakers to route it into Stereo Mix -- which gets its signal from the analog speakers buss. During the install process, the software suggests you install various junk and I exploited declined this and clicked cancel. Still, it installed 2 browser plugins and reset my start page in both Firefox and Chrome to sweet-page.com. Resetting this did not help, it was there again on every new start. Uninstalling CamStudio did NOT remove the unwanted software. I had to remove it with some spyware removal tool and reboot. While it seems the installed packages do not steal account credentials or destroy files, this behavior of hijacking the browser and rerouting the traffic and refusing uninstall is clearly very virus-like. For me, this is malware and there is no doubt about it. So I would say NO, it is not virus free. I have used countless open-source tools and none of them did not contain any malware. This was the first exception.

www.typeathome.com

No comments:

Post a Comment