I’ve been using Jing for screen captures. It also has video capture capabilities. There are a few problems with it though. One is that the output is a SWF, so you can’t edit it or upload it to YouTube or whatever. The other is that if you publish to Screencast, you have a 1GB bandwidth limit. The videos I posted this morning almost pushed me over that before noon, so I had to repost the SWFs on my own site and link to them from there. Finally, your video is heavily branded with the Jing logo at the end.
I was curious what would happen if I imported the output SWF into a new Flash movie. What you get a series of frames containing your capture. None of the player or branding stuff. You can then go to the file menu and export the whole thing as a Quicktime video.
The whole thing takes a couple of mouse clicks and a couple of minutes. If you have a lot of stuff to do, you’d obviously be better off getting some other program that outputs to video directly, but if you’re using Jing (which is free) already and have the need for a real video of one of your captures some day, there you go.
Hey Keith,
You can actually set up Jing to ftp files up to your own web server and generate the urls / embed code for you (no need to worry about Screencast.com limits). I’ve got a tutorial on how to accomplish this here:
http://www.brooksandrus.com/blog/2008/03/31/jing-ftp-flash-one-killer-blogging-tool/
Send me an email if you have other questions.
Although convoluted, you could yank the assets out of the .swf with swftools (http://www.swftools.org/), and stitch them back together with ffmpeg (http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/).
I love jing for workflow when I need to show another dev what i’m seeing etc, video/image capture is nice and easy there.
My wish list:
1. ability to change compression type/amount on video and images
2. save to clipboard (snagit)
3. record more than 5 minutes of video
4. cropping of image capture
I dig how FAST you have a video though – not to have to encode to another format is a huge time saver and posting the swf with their branding doesn’t really bother me since it’s free.
thanks.
I use swftools for my site to conver pdf into swf and create eBooks and it works great!