Camtasia is an excellent video recorder, editor and publisher, but it isn’t cheap. It was 1$ shy of $300 when I looked. That’s quite a lot of money, especially if you have never used a video recorder before and don’t really understand the long list of features and functions. What if you could cut your teeth on a low cost or even free recorder? Well you can.
Screentoaster is a rather unusual name for a free and very versatile web-based screen recorder. Erin gives us a quick video demo of how it works. You will need to create an account first.You will need Java to run it, which is also free. You can move the recording window where you want on your screen, and you can embed a webcam recording too. The recording quality is good, the file is small and you can upload it to youtube easily. Screentoaster is a good choice.
Screenr is another web-based screen recorder. Just like screentoaster, it very easy to use and there is a video tour. Recording quality is excellent, but it cannot be more than 5 minutes long. It also needs Java on your PC. You can then tweet your video and upload it to youtube. I’ve used screenr and it is a great way to learn how to record and use video. The only disadvantage of web-based screen recorders are they need decent size Internet bandwidth to work well. Not everyone has that luxury.
So, if you want to download a screen recorder to your PC, that is also free, you could try Jing project from techsmith, the publishers of camtasia. Jing works just like screentoaster or screenr, except you run it from your PC. Again there is a demo video to show you how it works. It can capture images and video. You can highlight the video with captions and once recorded, your video is very easy to share. There is a pro version, with more features, for $15 a year.
And last on my list, but certainly but no means least is camstudio. Camstudio has been around a while and is open source software, so it’s also free. You download it to your PC and the program is quite small. It has a lot of features and can certainly give camtasia a run for it’s money. But it can be tricky to setup if you are not a techie. It needs an encoder (LAME or MP3) and the default setting do not work well. Watch the featured video to learn how to set it up to make excellent recordings.
With so many good, free screen recorders, all you need to do is choose.
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