New screen recording tool: call for beta testers

Frederic Baumann wrote on 4/9/2012, 5:36 PM
Hi,

I frequently have to record webinars and software demos, and was looking for a tool to record what happens on my screen. Finding no affordable solution, and no appropriate freeware, (and for fun), I decided to develop my own tool which is now available in a beta status.

If you are interested to be a beta tester, please feel free to register. You will then receive the beta version, so that you can test it and make any relevant feedback. To thank them for their help, I will offer to the 20 first testers a 50% discount on the first official release when available - I will shortly and individually confirm by email that they are part of the 20.

Many thanks in advance for your help,

Frederic - FBmn Software

More details on the software:

Being familiar with Vegas, my favourite NLE software, I did not want a tool which provides its own editing capabilities: I did not want to pay twice these features.

So I developed FBmn Software ScreenRecorder, which catches the screen, mouse and keyboard events in a video+audio clip, which can then be edited in Sony Vegas or any other NLE.

The benefits are the following:

- the price of ScreenRecorder AND a tool like Vegas Movie Studio will be significantly cheaper than other professional solutions

- compared to various solutions, a set of options lets you embed several features in the video such as:

* all specific mouse pointers of any software are caught in the video (whereas some software always display an arrow even when the mouse actually shows as a crosshair)

* sounds can be added for keystrokes and mouse clicks

* legends for keystrokes and mouse clicks can be displayed.

* Alt, Ctrl, Shift... combinations are recognized and displayed in the recorded video.

- all the knowledge you may have of your usual NLE is immediately available, you don't have to learn a new tool for editing videos.

- all the advanced, extensible features of a standard NLE tool are available for screencasts. You don't have to stick to the ones developed within a specific screen recording tool.

Note: the tool assumes that you have an appropriate codec installed, such as Lagarith, or Xvid for instance. demonstrates how to use the tool, starting by the setup of the Lagarith codec (which is quite straightforward by the way).

Comments

ushere wrote on 4/9/2012, 6:22 PM
looks very interesting - however, an alternative, compressed file option might be a good idea;

i often send out 'tuts' to my students directly (without editing), via email / dropbox. your (short) demo created a 115mb file.....
Laurence wrote on 4/9/2012, 8:20 PM
The competition would be Snagit, and from what I am seeing so far, your program is better. Snagit only works in some sort of h264 which, if you are using Windows 7, Vegas cannot read. (Apparently Snagit captures work when done with older versions of Windows though).

I like that I can capture Cineform with your capture program.

I just grabbed your color matching tool today on the last day of the half price Facebook special. There are a couple of hours left if anyone here is looking at this program:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/FBmn-Software/165535820202992
Grazie wrote on 4/10/2012, 3:20 AM
Just used the Colour Matching S/W on a tortuous piece of 2-camera work. Marvellous!

Grazie

Frederic Baumann wrote on 4/10/2012, 3:11 PM
Hi,

thank you all for your answers. A few comments:

@ushere:
- A lossless codec is fine to avoid any loss of data before editing, but at the price of the file size. However, you may then encode the final video with Vegas to whichever format you wish. For instance, MainConcept AVC at 800x600, 10fps, 1Mbps, leads to about 18 MB for a 3-minute recording. The rendering is then super-fast.

- if you don't want to go through Vegas, you may use another codec such as XVid (free), which gives pretty good results, with a lower file size.

@Laurence & Grazie: thank you very much for your nice comments. I am very glad the plug-in helps you!

Frederic - FBmn Software