Screenshot Captor - Discussion of Screencasting and Movie Frame Editing Features

[mouser]

Placeholder thread for future feature  

[Renegade]

Screencasting would be...

A W E S O M E ! ! !

[mouser]

It's in progress.. It's going to be a somewhat unique implementation that people may find interesting.

HOWEVER, let me warn everyone in advance: I do not intend to implement ANY features for editing or annotating screencasts, at least not in the forseeable future.  That means that the build in screencast recording function will be a very poor solution for people who want to do ANY editing of screencasts, and I would strongly recommend using a proper screencast tool for those wanting to make real screencasts.

It will however be useful for quick and dirty recording, and will be especially suited for people who want to extract individual frames from a screencast recording for markup as individual screenshots -- I think this is where it will really shine and this will be its primary function: i.e. record a screencast, extract and markup frames as screenshots.

[Renegade]

Quick and dirty is good enough. The full-fledged screencasting suites out there are rather cumbersome to use sometimes. I think the only important options that I'd want would be window, region, and full-screen recording.

I use Screenshot Captor everyday - multiple times. It's one of the top programs that I put on every single new installation, and one of the first. It's drop dead simple to use, cuts out all the crappy "helper" features that only slow you down, and just lets me get screenshots quickly with no fuss. It's really about workflow/usability. The design philosophy that you've put into SSC would rock for screencasting.

[vlastimil]

I have my own screencasting needs covered (thanks to winning a Camtasia license here on DC ), but I see one scenario related to screencasting that is not properly covered with current products:

When a user of my software has a problem or a question, I would love to see a short screencast of the problem occurring instead of vague textual description (missing crucial context) in an email. The problem is the difficulty of creating a screencast - installing a new software, learning how to use it, selecting area for recording, configuring audio recording, choosing (or even installing) proper video codec, uploading the video somewhere, emailing me with a link... That is too much work, some of on the choices are non-trivial and require specific knowledge. It is certainly harder than writing an email...

A related use case involves a user that would like to create a video tutorial for my software, but does not want to invest too much time.

I believe many other developers would be grateful if their users had an easy way to record screencasts and share them. I even started working on something like this, but soon gave it up, because it was too far away from my core business and seemed not exactly trivial. My plan was to have 1 or 2 buttons in the status bar of my application ("Start recording" or "Pause recording"+"End recording"). Start recording would show a window with understandable options like "record audio" and "record from webcam and place it in the corner". End recording would show a window allowing the user to name and describe the video and save it to file, upload it to youtube or to my web server, or send the video via email. I was planning to incorporate Google's open source VP8 codec and nothing else. The recording would always contain just the active window scaled to 1280x720 pixels (keeping pixel aspect ratio). In short, as few options as possible during the whole process.

If the screenshot captor with screencasting would somehow make this use case practical, that would be great. Alternatively, if you decided to sell licenses for a screencast-recording library, that would make it easy for developers to implement features I described above, that may become a popular thing as well - but it would need some research.

[ewemoa]

When a user of my software has a problem or a question, I would love to see a short screencast of the problem occurring instead of vague textual description (missing crucial context) in an email.

Great use case!

A related use case involves a user that would like to create a video tutorial for my software, but does not want to invest too much time.

Another nice one

Now why isn't this sort of thing in the OS

[cranioscopical]

When a user of my software has a problem or a question, I would love to see a short screencast of the problem occurring instead of vague textual description

A good idea from the user's perspective, also.

@mouser: Any new ideas about compression?

[Renegade]

@mouser: Any new ideas about compression?

Good point. It's a tough question to answer as different codecs have different strengths/weaknesses. If it's primarily software oriented, then the question is at least easier.

[dluby]

I look forward to this functionality being added. SSC just keeps getting better and better.