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What Are Screen Casts

A screen cast is a recording of the activity on your desktop. Screen casts can contain annotations and audio. The audio can be a file from your hard drive or from a microphone. Screen casts are often used to create video tutorials or demonstrations.

How Do I Make a Screen Cast?

There are freewares you can use to create your screen cast like CamRec. The most effective and user friendly software I know of is Camtasia from Techsmith. It is not free but well worth the investment. You can download a free trial version to for yourself why it is number one.

What Format Shoud I Save My Video?

The format you save in depends on what you want to do with the screen cast. Is it to put on cd for pc play back? TV play back? Is it for the web? Do you want to upload it to You Tube for the world to see?

Flash Video

Flash videos have an .flv extention. If you want to play them from your pc you need an flv player like Wimpy. Flv vidos have a reasonable size and upload well. This format is perfect for web diffusion. You Tube let’s you upload any video and converts it to flv.

Avi

Audio Video Interleaved. A computer graphics animation format used in Microsoft(tm) Video for Windows. This format interleaves digitized video frames (or computer-generated frames) and synchronized audio in one file. The clips generated in the AVI format may be played back in a Windows(r) equipped PC, usually independent of screen resolution and color palette.

MP4

Stands for MPEG (Moving Picture Expert Group) - 4. Finalized toward the end of 1998, this became an International Standard in the beginning of 1999. This was developed to provide low bandwidth multimedia applications.

XviD

XviD is a free and open source MPEG-4 video codec. XviD was created by a group of volunteer programmers after the “OpenDivX” project was closed in July 2001. XviD is a primary competitor of DivX. While DivX is closed source and may only run on Windows, Mac OS and Linux, XviD is open source and can potentially run on any platform.

divX

Digital Video Express (DivX) refers to the MPEG-4 video compression standard, which boasts high quality and low bitrate. Originally developed for DVD encoding, DivX has become the internet video format of choice for high-quality productions.

MPEG2

Moderately Compressed. Usually high bitrate, high quality, found on DVDs and SVCDs. Usually combined with .ac3/.dts audio (DVDs) or MPEG-2 audio (SVCDs, some DVDs).

MPEG1

Moderate compression, found on VCDs and many web downloads. Can be high quality. Usually contains MPEG-1 Audio.

SVCD

Super Video Compact Disc. MPEG-2 video on CD. Used primarily in Asia although, like VCD, it is rapidly gaining popularity in the US.

VCD

See also Video CD. Video Compact Disc. Near-VHS-quality MPEG-1 video on CD. Used primarily in Asia, though it is rapidly gaining popularity in the US.

What Are Codecs?

Technically a codec is a device or program capable of performing encoding and decoding on a digital data stream or signal. The word codec may be a combination of any of the following: ‘Compressor-Decompressor’, ‘Coder-Decoder’, or ‘Compression/Decompression algorithm’.

What this means is when you are trying to view a video and there is no sound or a player can not open a file, your PC is probably only missing some codecs. I recommend K-Lite free codec pack to solve your problems quickly and for free.

Where Can I Upload My Screen Cast?

If you upload them on your site you might be surprised to see your disk space and bandwidth disappear. Try uploading them to You Tube or a screen cast host like Screencast.com.

Happy screen casting!

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