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On Tuesday, TechSmith released Jing Pro, a paid premium version of its free screen capture and casting software. The new service, which runs $14.95 a year, upgrades videos to H.264 encoding, takes off the Jing watermark in the bottom corner of recorded clips, and gives users the option to upload directly to several popular video hosting sites including Facebook, YouTube, Viddler, and Vimeo.

Of the news, one of the biggest changes is the move to the MPEG-4 AVC video format. It's the go-to format for iPods and iPhones, as well as set-top boxes like the Apple TV and TiVo. Likewise, it's been adopted by YouTube, which makes a separate encode for each file for Flash players and hardware that run H.264 clips. This means that going forward your screencast may end up being able to be watched on a wider range of devices.

On the export front I'm a little surprised TechSmith is offering such a simple way to offload captured videos to third-party hosting sites. It's really nice, but will no doubt cut into potential revenue from people who might have paid the extra cash for the company's video hosting sister product, Screencast.com. This service has a higher cap on its file size (2GB up from most service's 1GB max), but limits how many people can watch your content to 2GB of streaming video.

In addition to the launch of Jing Pro, TechSmith put up a new support site called the Jing Help Center, which has a handful of how-to videos and support documents. This is available to both free and pro users.

Download Jing (via CNET's Download)

(Credit: CNET)

Folks looking for free screen-recording applications may be well aware of Jing Project and CamStudio. TipCam is equally deserving, if not more so.

The freeware screen recorder loads a scosh more than the basics into an attractive and compact display, and throws in a few tricks all its own. We're talking about drawing on the screen with your mouse while you record, and recording remote desktops via a VNC server. Brilliantly, if you press the hot key to zoom in, the framing brackets will follow your mouse until or unless you lock them in place.

Unfortunately, the TipCam control panel isn't so intelligent. If you're not careful, it might inadvertently star in your screencast. After you become familiar with the icons, it's best two switch to mini mode to keep it out of the way.

TipCam's audio recording feature is more primitive-leaning--there's no post-production studio for editing audio if you mess up. Thankfully, you can rerecord with the voice-over tool. It's not a perfect method, but it's better than having to rerecord takes. Recording a separate audio track and tweaking it with a small editor would be the most ideal.

TipCam's developers have put good thought behind its delivery modes. In a click, you can upload to UtipU.com. There's also YouTube uploading you configure as the default, and the capability to make your recording a private link that's inserted into a new e-mail message for you to send to selected recipients.

TechSmith raises the bar with version 6 of Camtasia Studio, which was released Wednesday. While the essentials remain the same in this feature-stuffed software for creating and producing screen recordings, a few well-placed adjustments and capabilities make their mark in creating overall faster screencasts.

Among the changes, support for high-definition (Blu-ray) video, independently editable audio and video tracks, and time-saving hot keys are the most critical.

The ability to produce HD-quality screencasts (for the Web and mobile phones) is cool for those with HD computers, but on the technical side, the HD-friendly format (MPEG-4 AVC format with H.264 compression) produces videos faster and in dramatically smaller files than the Shockwave format (SWF) that was Camtasia Studio's default before this release. Videos play back in Flash, so you'll be making Web demos, for instance, that use less bandwidth. You will lose a smidge in quality with the format (about 10 percent, TechSmith estimates), but it's of little notice to the untrained eye.

Larger icons make it easier to cut to the chase while recording.

(Credit: CNET)

Editing tools
The brand-new ability to edit audio and video tracks separately is another noticeable improvement to Camtasia Studio 6, and one you'd find in professional video production software like Final Cut Pro for Mac. This is a huge boon for anyone who needs a few passes to get their recording right. If you made a mistake in a previous version, you'd have to restart your narration and screen recording until you got it right. Cropping a video clip in the timeline also meant chopping off your narration along with it. This new division of labor lets you sub in sections of tape and video without wrecking the entire timeline.

Camtasia Studio 6 also scores big with hot keys, introduced for the first time in this version. By pressing a single letter on the keyboard, you'll be able to split the video (S), and add zoom (Z), transitions (T), callouts (C), captions (A), markers (M), and extended frames (E) in the video timeline. We've tried this and it's instantaneous.

A handful of loose tweaks also tightens up Camtasia Studio 6. For instance, the splash screen and recording module have gotten a visual scrubbing. The recorder, which seemed unfinished in the last version, is now much more dashing in a dark module set with large icons for recording areas of the screen. The new design lets you turn cursor effects on or off anytime during your screencast. You can also quash the perpetually blinking and often distracting corners found in version 5.1 that signified when the recorder was on.

In the realm of advanced editing, the 'tilt' feature adds perspective to a screenshot and can be used effectively (but judiciously) in combination with zoom and pan effects to make it appear that you're gliding into the center of the video. A new slider control lets you decide the effect's duration. Our one peeve: it's buried in the Advanced portion of the Zoom and Pan menu.

A new editing feature lets you tilt the video left and right.

(Credit: CNET)

The last added feature we'll mention is new support for dropping any self-contained MOV file into the video timeline. The ability to splice and intersperse video with PowerPoint slides, screen recordings, and scenes from the imported video has been available for AVI, WMV, and MPEG-1 formats in past Camtasia Studio builds. Version 6 brings the valuable capability to MOV files, while support for MPEG-4 formats has been unfortunately shelved for another day.

Price
Camtasia Studio 6 costs $299 new, $149 for an upgrade, and has a free 30-day trial that we'll post here.

The steep price tag makes Camtasia Studio 6 better suited for pro bloggers, businesses, academics, and avid amateurs, but those able or willing to make the investment will find a classy screen-recording application that continues to advance its flexibility, speed, and ease of use. Those looking for quick and dirty screencasts should look to CamStudio's freeware.

The team behind the screen-recording utility Camtasia have released a simplified, experimental version of the technology, packaged into a nice downloadable application for Windows and Mac called the Jing Project.

Jing makes it very easy to grab screenshots and videos straight from your PC, and then save them or share them on the Web. The coolest part of this experiment--in theory--is Jing's integration with Screencast.com, a hosting service for videos recorded off your computer. Once you've recorded a video, you can save it to your Screencast account, and from there you can get an embed code to put it in a blog or other page.

The experimental Jing is great, but oddly, the well-established Screencast.com site is the weak link in the chain. It's unattractive, and the embed codes are nearly impossible to find. On the plus side, the Screencast.com trial doesn't apply to Jing users--Jing has announced that the $6.95 monthly fee gets waived for Jing users. Still, Jing really needs a quick and easy way to upload files to more free vid-sharing sites.

FLV uploads are recommended to be in H.264, but other than that, for a clean, flexible, and almost fun way to grab pictures and onscreen videos, Jing really can't be beat.

UPDATE: Jing announced on June 18th that Screencast.com is free for Jing fans.

YouTube isn't the only way to share video, and it's certainly not the way to store and share professional screencasts with hiked-up bitrates. After 18 months as a beta mewling, on Wednesday, TechSmith's Screencast.com graduated to a full-fledged release.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Version 1 of Screencast.com continues to receive screen recordings produced in the freeware Jing Project (for Windows and Mac) and premium Camtasia Studio, though it's available to anyone willing to register and pay for storage. It has come some distance from the site covered by Webware.com as part of a July 2007 review of Jing Project. Webware editor Rafe Needleman had remarked that

"the well-established Screencast.com site is the weak link in the chain. It's unattractive, and the links you need (the embed codes) are nearly impossible to find. Plus, after 60 days, the free trial service expires--so don't get hooked if you can't stomach the $6.95-a-month fee for screencast hosting."

A lot has changed since then. Screencast.com's makeover addresses most of these critiques. In addition to a revamped interface, said Dirk Frazier, Screencast.com's product manager, in an interview with CNET, "we've moved from what was a very confusing workflow to a polished workflow."

Clicking "Share" pulls up URLs and embed codes you can copy to the clipboard.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Though still simple, Screencast.com's UI is intuitive and pleasant to behold. As a new addition to version 1, a details dialog springs up with each newly created folder. A portlier Help Center features a new design with improved search and deeper answers to common questions. Similarly, a new Tools page lays out links to TechSmith tools, like a media uploader for desktop videos and the MediaRoll embed widget that shares folder content for public folders.

The navigation buttons along the left remain useful for executing uploads and managerial tasks. Clicking an entry in the visual file system similarly offers up intuitive icons to open, edit, delete, or share the recording. (P.S. Clicking "share" is one way to get at those embed codes.)

Screencast.com's developers have also been sweating over back-end changes, like adopting a multiserver architected back-end that can bear more visitors and their recordings. Over the past six months, Frazier added, "lots and lots of improvements have been made on the data center side."

Fans of the service can expect more, too, in the upcoming months. Frazier's blog shares a snippet of Screencast.com's technical road map that includes H.264 encoded playback and social tools to "create a conversation around your content." "Oops," he writes, "that might be too much sharing."

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Have you ever made a screencast? A screencast is when you capture and record all the action that takes place on your desktop so you can view it as a movie. Many people use screencasts for presentations and instructional videos for software, though there are many other uses. Sometimes you probably wish you could make a screen recording for less computer-savvy friends and family so you wouldn't have to have those exhaustive phone calls: "No grandpa, I said Save the file...no...SAVE it."

I found a program for Mac today that makes creating screencasts easy. It's called ScreenFlow, and though it is a little cost prohibitive for friendly tutorials ($99), if you're going to make a presentation on a Mac, it's definitely the software to have. Once you have everything set up, simply launch ScreenFlow, choose what you want to record (like the desktop, your Webcam, and a microphone) and ScreenFlow will start recording everything simultaneously. Once the initial recording is finished, you can have the action on screen, your smiling face, and all the narration done in one-step.

Use the time line editing tools to find the appropriate spots to call out actions.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Once the recording phase is finished, ScreenFlow really shines with excellent editing tools to refine your presentation. You can call out certain parts of the screen with graphics or you can zoom in on the windows where the action is taking place. It also has an option to blur objects in the background, so you know the viewer is paying attention to the action at hand. In addition to calling out areas of interest in your presentation, you can use panning effects, add drop shadows and reflections, and you can combine other video files into your project. It also offers audio queues for mouse clicks and other actions to keep the presentation exciting.

Call out certain parts of your presentation and adjust opacity and zoom for easier readability.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

When your project is finished, ScreenFlow supports both Keynote and PowerPoint presentation software so you know you'll be able to use your screencast on any system in addition to your Web site or Blog. One drawback of this great software is that it only works on Leopard and certain features require a higher-end graphics card, so you'll need to upgrade if you haven't already. But with the right hardware, ScreenFlow makes it easy to make high quality screencasts for any project or presentation and it's relatively low cost makes it a great option for power users.

Screencasting is not for everyone. Most of the options out there are fairly full featured, but it's hard to find a good, free solution that can do as much as some of the pricey professional tools such as TechSmith's Camtasia Studio (download) or Adobe's Captivate (download). A new service that launched this week called uTipu (download TipCam for Windows) is stepping into the ring and offering up a Windows-only (for now) one-stop screencasting service that combines both a software tool to grab your onscreen action, along with an uploader that will send it off to uTipu's server farm for YouTube-like Web hosting. The hope is that anyone who wants to make a screencast or two will be able to download the app and get going without too much of a hassle, similar to what TechSmith's been up to with its Jing Project (download for Windows or Mac).

Like other software-based screencasting tools, uTipu's got a few tricks to get your screencasts looking right. You can set it to record your entire screen, or just a small section. It can also follow your cursor, and highlight what you're doing with a little translucent yellow circle. There are recording controls to pause and stop the action, as well as an annotation shortcut in case you feel like drawing on the screen John Madden-style. For audio and voiceovers, there's no post-production workspace, so you have to record your narration at the same time as the video and hope you don't make any mistakes.

Advanced users get some nice tweaks, such as VNC server setup to record screens on remote computers, and frame-rate quality controls to bump up how smooth your videos look. The one caveat is that higher frame rates also increase your file size, and uTipu's only serving up 250MB of free hosting for the time being, but about a minute of medium size video at 15 frames per second runs at about 3MB, which means you'll be able to create and send about 16 videos at the five-minute time cap. If you're close to running out of space, you can also skip the option to upload to uTipu's servers entirely by uploading them to any video hosting service that accepts the FLV Flash format.

On the whole, uTipu's off to a good start, but by not providing some post-processing tools to clean up your work, it's not offering a whole lot more than what you can get from its formidable competition, such as the zero-install Screencast-o-matic, and the cross-platform Jing from TechSmith.

I've embedded a sample of a user-created uTipu video after the break. As you can see, it's nice and big, and you can actually read the onscreen text. My less informative one can be found here.

... Read more

If programs were people, the sleeker, trimmer-looking Camtasia Studio 5 would be the guy or gal who, after emerging from a months-long stint with a personal trainer, has now stretched out on the sand to enjoy the response.

Behind the scenes, TechSmith's Camtasia team has been pumping serious iron into a handful of new features for each of Camtasia's major recording, editing, producing, and playback functionalities. The final result is a more robust screen recording and producing app that's gained significant muscle without added fat. While there are still some flaws to work out, Camtasia Studio 5 offers streamlined performance for the same price as its predecessor--$299 new; $149 to upgrade.

Here's a look at the new and enhanced features in order of appearance.... Read more