Cheap solution for.....

evm wrote on 1/13/2006, 5:02 PM

I would like to be able to record my activities while I am working in Vegas, to make tutorials for other people to view. How would I go about doing that?

Thanks for the help.

BTW, this MB rocks! Lots of nice people how are always answering questions for others, thanks!

Comments

farss wrote on 1/13/2006, 5:08 PM

There's a number of screen capture utilies available, some cost money and others are free. However one issue you face with all of them is the resolution of a PC screen is way higher than SD video so things can look very ugly. THe other solution is to use a video card with video outputs and record that or else feed the PCs video outputs through a Scan Converter. Sony and Canopus both make very good scan converters but again don't expect miracles, the resolution issue is still there.
If you've got a LCD monitor then simply pointing a camera at it works remarkably well.
Bob.

JohnnyRoy wrote on 1/13/2006, 5:39 PM

I can highly recommend SnagIt 7 for $39. It is made by TechSmith (the same folks that make the expensive but nice Camtasia) and it is outstanding for all sorts of tutorial work both still image and video. After playing with lots of utilities that claimed to do this cheaply, I still didn’t find one that worked well. Then I downloaded the SnagIt 7 trial version and I bought it the very next day.

As far as capture, it can do everything Camtasia can except you don’t get the TechSmith codec which is optimized for screen capture. You also don’t get Camtasia Studio which you don’t need anyway if you have Vegas (but if you don’t have Vegas Camtasia studio is a complete editing environment). It also does some things Camtasia can’t like easily annotate still images with arrows, circles, text, etc. If you can afford Camtasia, that is the one to get but it’s kind of pricy if you are just being nice and sharing your talent and not making money at it to pay for it.

For FREE you can’t beat Windows Media Encoder. It’s from Microsoft and it’s quite a nice package for free. Of course in encodes to WMV files but those are probably what you want to use for web delivery anyway.

~jr

johnmeyer wrote on 1/13/2006, 6:56 PM

Satish's wonderful Wink program will probably do exactly what you want. It is free and quite easy to use. The results can be distributed as HTML or Flash. I've made quite a few tutorials that I email to people (they're small files).

Click on the link. I think you'll like it.

B.Verlik wrote on 1/13/2006, 8:25 PM

Super cheap solution.....(and don't forget, you get what you pay for), but it works.
Point your camera at the screen, be sure the monitor is set at 60Hz or 75Hz (eliminates horizontal rolling). Turn off the auto-focus on your camera. You may want to adjust your focus through a TV, so you can read everything. You can record your sound from your computer, withiin your computer (you can even run lines from Computer outputs to a separate recorder) while commenting into the camera mic.
Like most of my solutions......FREE!

Steve Mann wrote on 1/14/2006, 12:49 PM

Even better is to shoot an LCD screen. No refresh, so no creeping black line in the image.

Steve

sping wrote on 1/14/2006, 3:30 PM

Camstudio http://www.camstudio.org/ does screen capture to AVI. Free.

/Olle

evm wrote on 1/28/2006, 5:32 PM

Wow, thanks for all the suggestions guys. So far I really like this one and its free. Thanks for all the responses, you people are great.