Screencasts and video encoding for online sharing ...

Thought it's worth making a few notes on how I did the screen captures below. So I don't forget!

First of tried Camstudio which is a very nifty free application for screen recording. It's worth downloading their free lossless codec too - the other ones it comes with are no good. It has to ability to convert the file to Flash format which is very nice. You could also use the Riva FLV Encoder (which is another great free download). It lets you select fullscreen or a screen region but not an application window (yet ...). I find it easiest to use a window resizing application like

Auto Window Manager to make the window size of the screen you want to capture 800x600 say and then select capture "fixed region" and fill out the screen thus:

I had still had varied results with this application capturing something like Photoshop Elements and the effects I was applying. Without the file size being massive.

Next I tried Microsoft Windows Encoder. This is an excellent application and is very powerful (and also an excellent way to put your dual core processor to work!). The New Session wizard has an option for screen capture and uses a specialist Microsoft screen capture codec for the encoding which does an amazing job even at lower bitrates. Plus you can select an application window. (I still set that window to 800x600) with Auto Window Manager.) Also select capture audio if you want to. Those settings may work perfectly but I was trying to show a high resolution image and the adjustments made to it so upped the bitrate to 500kbps and made the key frame interval 1s. But I did reduce the frame rate to 5 fps to make the most of the 500 kbps. I played around with this a lot - it can be tricky to get the right settings. For most situations you can probably stick with the wizard options.

Here's an example of one of the tutorials below in it's original capture format.

Windows encoder also installs two usefull utilities: a file editor which can trim a wmv file without re-encoding and a profile editor which can create profiles which can be used in Windows Movie Maker (or here in Vista) (only single pass encodings - not VBR, or peak VBR; only CBR and quality VBR).

For preparing video clips for online video sharing sites I also played around with various encodings. I found these to be the best settings (which I saved as a Windows Movie Maker (save in "program files\movie maker\shared\profiles (need to create that profiles directory in Vista)") and Windows Encoder profile):