In this guide, I`ll walk you through Industry’s Best Free Screencasting tools along with the paid ones. We will cover all three platforms: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X.
FREE Tools:
1. CamStudio (Windows) Taranfx’s Recommended
3. ScreenToaster (Web-based, Free)
4. Go View Taranfx’s Recommended
Go View offers desktop screen recording (with audio) as well as free hosting for your recorded screencast videos with no bandwidth constraints. Captures HQ video shots.
5. Jing (Windows/Mac, Basic: Free, Pro: $14.95 per year) Taranfx’s Recommended
Jing is the more compact cousin of Camtasia Studio (see below) and great for less complicated—and more economical!—screencasting. Both the free and pro version are limited to 5 minutes of screen recording and come with a free account at Screencast.com for sharing your captures. This is the only limitation.
The free version can save video as SWF video and is branded with the Jing logo. The pro version allows you to save your videos as SWF and MPEG-4 files, the branding is removed, and you can also share directly to YouTube (in HD) and record from your webcam. Both the free and pro version use the same intuitive and easy menu.
Jing isn’t just another great screencasting application. Jing is an interesting “project”. At first glance, I wasn’t sure I knew exactly what Jing was all about.
6. Capture Fox – Firefox add-on that turns your Firefox browser in a screencasting application. It can record Firefox as well as the entire desktop screen and will save it as a video file.
7. Tip Cam –
8. Wink (Windows, Linux), Open Source
Wink, available for Windows & Linux, can capture screenshots, mouse movements and you may also add annotations to your screencasts. You can also add voice narrations at the time of recording and screencasts can be exported as Flash, PDF or EXE for distribution on a CD.
The Tools is quite featureful, and looks like a wise deal.
9. Istanbul: (Linux)
GTK-based Open Source tool for Linux can record the desktop screen into an Ogg Theora video codec, works on GNOME, KDE and XFCE.
Paid Tools (Professional)
10. Camtasia Studio (Windows, $299)
11. ScreenFlow (Mac, $99)
ScreenFlow is a Mac-only screencast editor that fills a nice niche between the limited-but-free options and the car-payment-sized options. ScreenFlow sports advanced features, like the ability to decouple audio and video streams for independent editing and audio ducking (if you’re using background music it’s automatically adjusted during speaking portions of the video); the ability to freeze, speed up, or slow down the video to allow you to time lapse or zoom through a more tedious portion of the task you’re demonstrating. ScreenFlow also supports custom cursors and callouts for emphasizing the cursor or foremost window.
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