Daniel Watrous » camstudio http://www.danielwatrous.com Bridging the gap between internet technology and internet marketing Thu, 02 Feb 2012 18:22:40 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 A good screen ruler http://www.danielwatrous.com/a-good-screen-ruler http://www.danielwatrous.com/a-good-screen-ruler#comments Thu, 04 Feb 2010 16:15:18 +0000 Daniel http://www.danielwatrous.com/?p=140 Some tools fall under the category of utility for me. By that I mean that they aren’t cool, they don’t provide anything novel and so long as they work reliably then I never really notice that they’re there or not. It’s sort of like electricity and natural gas. You don’t really think of them as being great unless you don’t have them. Other things like a big screen TV are cool and grab your attention.

What a lead in for a screen ruler… Bu the fact is that I often use a screen ruler to figure out exactly how many pixels something is. An aside would be my complaint that something like the dimensions of a file that contains images, like a video file, should contain meta data that tells you the width and height. Anyhoo, I use a screen ruler a lot.

The first screen ruler I got was probably emailed to me by someone and I didn’t realize until years later that it was commercial software. It was made by a company called microfox and when I realized that it was commercial software I went to purchase it. Much to my disappointment they were charging $24.95. I just couldn’t justify paying that for it. Even though I liked it, that was too steep. If it had been $10 I probably would have purchased a license (might still purchase at that price), but I didn’t buy it because $24.95 for a screen ruler was just too much.

Like any red blooded American programmer, I immediately went looking for an open source (read cheap/free) alternative for my screen ruler needs. I found two right off (thanks Google for relevant results) that would fit my needs, and despite perhaps being less powerful than the commercial version, ended up doing everything I needed.

The first scree ruler is made by Spadix. From a functional perspective this did exactly the same thing the commercial option did, except that it cost 100% less. Thank you Spadix.

However, true to my American “I need options” nature, I clicked on the next link down and found the this screen ruler. I was turned off by the wood grain and the bulky look, but right before I bounced off the site, I noticed the embedded youtube video. Usually these are pretty boring (and so was this one), but I clicked on it just to see what the ruler could do. It actually turned out to have a lot of worthwhile features. Because of the video I downloaded and tried his ruler. Here’s the video the guy put on his site:

In the end I went with the Spadix ruler because it updates all the time showing on the ruler exactly how many pixels to the side I am of the ruler end. I’m not sure that’s better, but it’s what i’m used to and that ruler does it’s job just fine.

Wouldn’t this be a boring post it all I talked about was a comparison between screen rulers? The reason for writing this up on my site is to point out that an informative, easy to watch video might make the difference between someone bouncing off your site and staying a minute longer to dig a little deeper. In the case of this second ruler, they guy probably spent 20 minutes recording, tweaking and then uploading this video to youtube. Since he used youtube he has not hosting, no players, no bandwidth or anything else. I’m not sure what he used to make the video, but it was probably CamStudio, so he didn’t even have any overhead costs.

If you haven’t done it yet, why don’t you make a video to showcase some of the reasons why someone should stay on your site for a few minutes more. Then check your bounce rate in a few days and see if you succeeded in capturing a few of the more lazy folk that might have previously written you off. Then come back here and post a link to your page so can watch your video.

]]> http://www.danielwatrous.com/a-good-screen-ruler/feed 0 How to make CamStudio work (use AVS) http://www.danielwatrous.com/how-to-make-camstudio-work-use-avs http://www.danielwatrous.com/how-to-make-camstudio-work-use-avs#comments Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:26:48 +0000 Daniel http://www.danielwatrous.com/?p=43 Screen capture video is a big thing these days, and it’s getting bigger.  There are a few reasons that creating screen capture videos is so popular.  Some that are interesting to me include:

  • Fast to produce and deploy
  • No cameras, lighting, extensive editing, color correction, etc.
  • For software/websites it’s the most effective way to illustrate a process
  • Easy to make regular presentations more effective online

There is plenty of software that you can use on Windows and Mac to create screen capture videos.  On Windows the best known software is Camtasia Studio by Techsmith.  On Mac the ScreenFlow software seems the best choice.  These products cost $300 and $100 respectively, which can turn out to be a lot of money for someone that’s just getting started.

The good news (at least for Windows users) is that an open source program called CamStudio is available.  One of the greatest things about CamStudio is it’s lossless codec which stores the video in a what that doesn’t lose any quality. Well, I suppose it’s great until you want to upload it to your website, and that’s where I kept getting stuck.

Software by Jacek Pazera (also open source and freeware) can be used to convert video into flv and mp4, which have small sizes and can be played inside flash.  This reduces the drain on your resources (like bandwidth), and increases the size of the audience that can see your video (flash has a very broad distribution).

So, the big problem I have is that putting these two free software solutions together just doesn’t produce a good output.  The resulting video looks horrible and is unusable.  So I was disappointed that I couldn’t use CamStudio for screen capture videos.

In desperation, I tried the $15 upgrade to use TechSmith’s Jing product.  That’s basically a very watered down version of Camtasia Studio.  That worked OK and produced MP4 videos that would work great for the internet.  Two big problems with Jing are the 5 minute limit on screen capture videos and the fact that you can’t pan while recording.  Another bummer is that there’s no way to resize the video.

For example, say you make a screen capture video in 720p HD, but you also want a shrunk down version for low bandwidth visitors.  Jing doesn’t have a way to do this.  Again, Pazera ends up making the video unusable.  So, almost at whits end, I considered purchasing the $300 license to Camtasia, but as a last ditch effort, I decided to give AVS video converted a shot.  Turns out it worked fantastic.  I’ve never seen video convert and look so good (almost no visible quality loss).  I can resize, convert from avi to flv, mp4 and back and forth.  Anything!

The good news is that AVS is $30.  That’s 90% savings over Camtasia Studio and the outcome for my projects is comparable (especially since my hyperthreaded P4 at 2.4GHz can’t even make use of the watered down features of Jing, so how could it use all of Camtasia Studio.

So, my final workflow for creating screen capture videos is:

Other software that I mentioned, but that I don’t use for screen capture (but you might like to use it):

An Example

Hopefully this helps you with your screen capture.  And if you’re curious to see what one of my screen captures looks like using the CamStudio/AVS combination, take a look at this post on Maintain Fit: Exercise charts and graphs.  Notice that there I produced a downsampled version for direct playback and an HD MP4 version for download.  Both came from the same lossless AVI source produced by CamStudio.

]]> http://www.danielwatrous.com/how-to-make-camstudio-work-use-avs/feed 10