Thread: Screen grabbing

It will come as no surprise that I spend a lot of time making screengrabs, but I'm not alone. For teachers, software developers, bloggers and anyone with a technical support issue, a screengrab is usually worth, if not a thousand words, at least several sentences of description.

There's more than one way to make a screengrab. The PrtScr (Print Screen) Key, a relic from the time of MS-Dos, is OK for some things, but what if you d.on't want the whole screen or you need to see the cursor? Even if PrtScr gives you exactly what ypu want, you still need to paste the file from the clipboard into an application if you want it saved as a file.



This month, I'll show you how to make screengrabs, capture a sequence of screen actions as a movie and how to overcome a common problem, including movie playback in a screengrab. There are loads of screengrab utilities and you may well have a favourite: mine is Techsmith's Snagit So aside from Windows' built-in utilities, that's mainly what I'll be talking about here.

I've also recently discovered another Techsmith product for capturing screen movies - Camtasia Studio 5. In the past, my efforts to produce video tutorials have involved the use of screen capture, audio recording and video-editing software. As I recently had to produce some video tutorials for a website, I gave Camtasia a try and was pleased with the results. I've commented on what I think are some of
this application's best features at the end of this column.