Making a Screencast with CamStudio

In the previous post, Taking a Screenshot , I showed how to take a still picture of your computer screen using a free screen capture tool called Gadwin PrintScreen. Sometimes, however, it is more effective to make a movie of what is happening on your screen, so the person viewing it can see the actual process. This kind of movie is called a screencast.

To illustrate this point, here is a screencast I made with a free product called CamStudio (http://camstudio.org), showing how to insert a video into an Impress slide:

(Note: To play the screencast, left click on the little arrow at the lower left corner of the video box.)


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(Left click here to play screencast.)

(Note: Dragging and dropping a video within an Impress slide is normally very smooth. It's jerky in this example because I was running both Impress and CamStudio at the same time, which overwhelmed my computer and slowed it down.)

The process for creating a screencast with CamStudio is very simple. This tutorial shows how to do this on a computer running Windows Vista.

(1) When you launch CamStudio in Windows, the following screen will appear:





















(2) CamStudio offers three options for making a screencast of your computer screen:

(a) the entire desktop,

(b) user-selected portion of the screen or

(c) a single window.

I prefer option b, so I can control the size of the area I'm recording.

To set the screen capture size to option b:

(a) left click on "Region" at the top of the CamStudio menu and

(b) if it's not already checked, left click on "Region" in the menu that appears.






















(3) Now, to keep the CamStudio window out of the screencast, minimize it as you would any other window, by left clicking on "Minimize" "(-)."





















(4) To begin recording the screencast,

(a) right click on the CamStudio icon at the bottom right of the desktop and

(b) left click on "Record."




















(5) Left click on a corner of the area of your screen you wish to record and, while holding down the left mouse button, drag the box that appears to select your recording area.























(6) When you release the left mouse button, a green bracket will appear at each corner of the portion of the screen being recorded and recording will begin.


















At this point, begin the process you wish to record.


(7) To stop recording, right click on the CamStudio icon at the bottom right of the desktop and left click on "Stop" in the menu.




















(8) Navigate to where you wish to save the file.

The file will be saved in AVI format. To name the file, replace the "*" in "*.avi" with the name of your file.






















(9) Left click on "Save" to save your file.























The AVI format is suitable for inclusion in an Impress presentation. If you wish to upload the screencast to a blog or website, you will need to convert it to the smaller, Flash Video Format (FLV). Refer to the post Convert a Video Format with Any Video Converter for instructions on how to do this.