3 Apps I love for capturing what's on the screen

For years I had taught people how to do screen captures with the Print Screen button and continued to be mildly surprised when people who get excited when they learned that there was actually a purpose for tha button on the keyboard! I still use that when I am not at my own computer.
Since I have to do some faculty development sessions, training medical educators on use of technology in education, I had to find some tools that were easier to use. So here is my very short list of 3 applications that I find very useful.

1. Jing - This is a great tool for capturing a portion of the screen and annotating it with arrows and text. While it does do screencasting, the free version has limits on time of a single movie and it puts its logo prominently at the end of the movie. It also allows to upload the captured image to its online repository. I do not use that much as I need to save and reuse the images for other purposes.

2. Wink - After a lot of trials and errors, I have settled on Wink for screencasting. It creates a flash movie from a window that you select on your screen. You select the number of frames/sec and it will capture these faithfully. It has a builtin annotation tool for adding callouts, textboxes etc. Also automatically adds pauses to the movie and you can add navigation buttons for the user so they can read the text and then proceed with the movie. You can delete unnecessary frames and thus keep the movie short and sweet. The only problem I had was deciding on the resolution. I used the Firefox window resizer add-on and captured at 800X600 so I could put the flash file in a frame or otherwise have room left on either side.

3. FRAPS - this is the only one of the 3 that I spent money on (35 dollars). I use Second Life for various educational purposes and FRAPS allows me to record the machinima in SL - both audio and video. It is very easy to use and has a hot key to start, stop the recording. The only thing to keep in mind is the incredibly HUGE file size. For one 20 minute recording it used up 10 GB of space on my HD. The solution is to use Virtual Dub to compress this to MPEG4 and the same file become close to 400 MB.

So that's it! Jing, Wink and FRAPS.

JING - Inserting flash movies into PowerPoint

Have heard a lot about Jing as a great screen capture utility. Some key features of the free version:

1. Image and video with/without audio capture


2. Integrated upload to server


3. Annotation tools - arrows, text, rectangles


4. Cool interface

I tried it out and while it works as stated I found several issues

1. The video saves only as swf files (for free version)


2. The end of the video has a Jing splash page which means you would not use this for any professional use. (the Pro version does not have this)


3. It does not allow one to select a particluar application window - just has cross hairs to select an area.

So if you want to capture static images from your screen, it works fine but there are several other similar tools to choose from. I found this review by Matthew Ellison which includes reviews of 2 free utilities ScreenHunter 5 Free and TNT ScreenCapture 2.1. Of course One Note does a great job of grabbing the screen shots and then letting you annotate them. The good old method of [Print Screen] and then pasting into your favorite image editing application works too.

For screencasting software or video screen capture (used for software training) I found a list on Wikipedia. In addition Microsoft has a simple tool called community clips recorder.

Having made these screencasts I wanted to put them into a PowerPoint presentation. This was easier said than done. You cannot just insert the swf file created by Jing into PowerPoint. You have to go through some steps which are not difficult. These are outlined here by Geetesh Bajaj. The key step there is to get the Shockwave Flash ActiveX control. Surprisingly neither Microsoft nor Adobe provide this control! But you can get it by just searching in Google.

Summary of steps (PowerPoint 2003):(added 3/28/09)

1. Save/copy the flash movie to the same folder as your PowerPoint file
2. Go to the slide where you want the movie to show
3. View >> Toolbars >> Control toolbar
4. On Control Toolbox >> click on More Controls >> Scroll down to
   Shockwave Flash Object
5. If you don't have this option, Google for Shockwave Flash Object ActiveX
   control and install it.
6. Drag the cross-hairs on your slide and size and position the object
   window.
7. Right click on the window and choose Properties
8. In the table that pops up do the following:
   a) Opposite Movie type in
   the name of your swf file (since it is in the same folder you don't need to type
   the entire path)
   b) Change Embed to True
9. Now run the slide show and you should be able to see the movie!

The next big challenge is to navigate the slide show with the flash movie playing. The normal keyboard arrow key shortcuts do not work to go to next or previous slide while the Flash movie is playing. The best option is to create some action buttons for next and previous slides on the master slide. Make these quite small and size the flash control so that these buttons are not hidden. Then you can navigate the slide show and if you get your timing down you can jump to the next slide just before the Jing Splash page shows up at the end of the movie. If you are going to create the show as a tutorial for someone else to navigate, might be best to set up timings. You can do this by Slide show>> Slide transition >> Advance slide automatically after XX seconds (depending on length of movie).

Have fun!