Del DeVries : Screen Capture Videos 2008-10

Screen capture video is a great tool for explaining in words and pictures a concept, a series of steps, or to provide a demonstration. The objective is to narrate either a PowerPoint or a series of steps in a software application.

I was back to this point again today trying to put together some explanations of flowcharting concepts. It is important to emphasize just a couple of guidelines to make flowcharts more understandable. I've used Camtasia to create videos but today I was searching for quick and easy rather than powerful and feature filled. Another objective is that the resulting video file be somewhat small and capable of serving from a web site. SWF and FLV are my preferred video formats for this. Another secret is that I would like to do the capture without editing and focus on short.

Jing

So what did I find? A free product called Jing from Techsmith, the company behind Camtasia. Jimg limits the video to 5 minutes and is a one pass solution. It has some interesting capabilities with saving SWF files to your local drive, FTP support, and hosting on screencast.com (2 GB storage for free).

My initial quick and dirty 2 minute video on flowcharting is at: http://campus.belmont.edu/devriesd/AIS/video/SysFlowchartTest.swf. The SWF file (shockwave file), plays automatically in browsers with the Flash player.

_2008-10-10

Tags: video - screen capture - teaching- students

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Art is making the strange familiar and the familiar strange.

Paul Klee

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