Thread: Making video screengrabs

If you want to record a sequence of actions as displayed on your screen to make a movie, you'll find that many applications designed to capture a single shot can also do movies. But while these are OK for short sequences, you'll need something a little more heavy-duty for producing either software demos or video tutorials.

For the past few weeks I've been using Camtasia Studio 5. Making video tutorials isn't something I do on a regular basis, but there are a few Camtasia features that can help you get a more professional end result, without having to spend hours using a video-editing application.



Camtasia allows you to define the area of the screen to be recorded and Techsmith's Screen Capture codec ensures that menu text is readable, even whenthe video output size is smaller than the original screen resolution. Camtasia lets you record a voiceover either while you make the screen capture, or during subsequent playback. You can also pause the recording whenever you like and there's a really helpful feature that inserts duplicate video frames if your voiceover segment is too long to be accommodated.

Best of all, though; is a tracking feature that automatically zooms in on cursor activity, so your viewers get close-up shots of menu selections, tool applications and the like. All of this is keyframed on the video timeline so you can edit or remove it if it's not what you want. At about Rs.14,601 it isn't in the budget category, but you can download a free fully functional, 30-day trial.