Screen capture tools
by Kevin Dangoor
There are lots of interesting tools out there for capturing screen displays along with audio for demo purposes. Camtasia Studio – Screen Recording for Demos and Training looks like a good one for the PC. It allows you to easily add callouts and other features like that. It’s $299, but it’s really tuned for making demos and training materials.
There are some nice low-end options on the Mac. On the way low end, there’s Screen Record for only $20. It will record the screen with audio and save it as a Quicktime movie. That may seem pretty raw, but you combine that with iMovie for editing and Keynote for pulling together the demo, and it’s not such a bad thing.
Snapz Pro X is generally regarded as the creme de la creme of screen capture utilities for the Mac. Lots of options, and lots of polish on the UI. It’s $69.
Update 2/20/05: The current version of Wink doesn’t do audio or video capture, but it does let you capture screen shots and add annotations to make nice, compact Flash movies.
By the way, Joel had a good experience with Camtasia.
Update 8/17/05: I just learned about CamStudio, which is free, does audio and video, does captions, produces AVIs and SWFs and runs on Windows. Oh, and did I mention it’s free!
What a coincidence — I was going to blog about this over the weekend…
I tried out ScreenCapture on Panther and could not get it to work, even with its Panther update which just said “Updating, please wait” for about 20 minutes.
I stumbled across a very useful resource for Mac capture software:
http://www.pure-mac.com/screen.html
From that I found Screentool at:
http://www.citrussoftware.com/screentool.php
They have a demo version which seems to work just great. (I need to play around a bit more.) Great feature: it’s $12!
Thanks for the links. I did see the pure-mac page, but I somehow missed Screen Tool. $12 is hard to beat! The trick is figuring out how to do annotations and the like, which are easy in Camtasia Studio.
Has anyone found a Mac solution that allows the addition of text callouts to a demo/tutorial movie to make it accessible to the hearing impaired or those without a soundcard?
That’s funny. Someone else asked that very question on the TurboGears mailing list. I haven’t seen an integrated tool to do this. I was thinking I may record in Snapz Pro X as I did my first screencast, but then try to add captions via iMovie.
It’s worth mentioning that CamStudio isn’t just free as in “no charge”, it’s free as in “open source” — it’s GPL’ed!