Ask HN: What do you use for Screencasts? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What do you use for Screencasts?

#11

Post by stevelosh » Fri, Dec 03, 2010, 6:06 PM UTC

http://screenr.com/ is awesome (and free) for short screencasts.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use for Screencasts?

#12

Post by robwgibbons » Fri, Dec 03, 2010, 6:26 PM UTC

I used to use ScreenToaster, but it stopped working in Chrome on Linux for me. Screencast-o-matic seems to do the job.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use for Screencasts?

#13

Post by _b8r0 » Fri, Dec 03, 2010, 6:31 PM UTC

Thanks for the response everyone. Just to clarify I want to take a screencast, prepend some pre-generated video, append pre-generated audio and dub a separately recorded audio track. Ideally I'd do this in something quick like iMovie unless anyone knows of anything better.

Features that would be nice to have would be zooming in on particular areas and zooming out.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use for Screencasts?

#14

Post by MarkMc » Fri, Dec 03, 2010, 7:10 PM UTC

I used BB FlashBack because it had great mix of easiness and features: http://www.bbsoftware.co.uk/bbflashback/home.aspx

Re: Ask HN: What do you use for Screencasts?

#15

Post by sitmack » Fri, Dec 03, 2010, 7:14 PM UTC

Screenium is great for capture (on the mac). For editing I use after effects. iMovie would probably work really well. The most important thing is sound and the font size / screen size. Preview it a bunch with fresh eyeballs.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use for Screencasts?

#16

Post by adelegb » Fri, Dec 03, 2010, 7:28 PM UTC

Not sure if you are using Mac or PC, but for Macs I am a big fan of Camtasia. It has been very intuitive to use. They have a solid free trial that you can play around with also. I had never done video editing and I was up and running making tour videos in a day, here is the product of my work:http://help.bettermeans.com/home

Re: Ask HN: What do you use for Screencasts?

#17

Post by bmelton » Fri, Dec 03, 2010, 7:33 PM UTC

I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned yet, but I always figured Camtasia was the gold standard for this sort of thing.

It's $99, so perhaps the better-priced alternatives are the ones being suggested, but it's really quite impressive.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use for Screencasts?

#18

Post by aquark » Fri, Dec 03, 2010, 7:57 PM UTC

There are a couple of older threads on this which are worth reading:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=436523 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=133349 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=198158 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=930530

I went round this loop a while ago and Camtasia really wins out

Re: Ask HN: What do you use for Screencasts?

#19

Post by benkant » Sat, Dec 04, 2010, 11:07 AM UTC

evbart wrote: post #7

I use Screenflick for OS X - http://www.araelium.com/screenflick/

+1 for Screenflick. It's great.