Make Your Screen Capture Video Stand Out!

Demonstrative and educative videos largely depend on computer screen capture for making them. It makes sense because people who learn things on the Internet find it familiar in many cases to grasp ideas and concepts from screen captures than the videos made otherwise.

Most of the video tutorials in this blog like this one have been made with screen captures to explain and elaborate the topics dealt with, and experience tells that the readers find them easier to understand.

Sophisticated screen capture tools like Camtasia Studio, Magix Movie Edit Pro, Adobe Captivate, and others do the work well and nearly effortlessly, and that alone make them popular among makers of online video.

Camtasia Studio for example is far more than merely screen capturing software. Specialized works like recording PowerPoint presentation, recording camera videos, video and audio editing, making video playlist, video conversion to various formats, and so on can be done with it. And now the latest version has more power to make your video look hip and snazzy.

Camtasia Studio v6 - An excellent screen capture tool, plus more

Some Useful Features

4 main features I find useful with Camtasia are as under:

• Anything on the computer screen can be recorded. That means you can record the fast flash movies, the PowerPoint videos, and also the videocam movies.

 

• After recording the different videos, you are able to edit them individually, and then mix them in Camtasia itself. This becomes easy since all the recorded videos essentially have the same format.

 

• The voiceover, or a peppy background tune, or both can be separately added to the video to any portions of it.

 

• Finally, you are able to produce the end video in wide range of formats like RealMedia, QuickTime movie, Windows Media Video, H.264, iPod/iTunes/iPhone compatible video, and so on.

Screen Capture Dos’ & Donts’

Here are some golden rules for making excellent screen capture video:

1. All the different components of the video must have the same resolution. This is a very important point. If the individual components differ in resolution or dimensions, chance is there will appear black bands around the shorter ones, making the end video look ugly.

 

2. In cases where the different video components have different formats, you need to ensure that all of them are compatible with each other. Otherwise they cannot be mixed to make a combined video.

 

3. If you plan to host your screen capture video on YouTube ensure that the video has 16:9 aspect ratio. This means the video can have dimensions like 1040×585 pixels, 960×540 pixels, 800×450 pixels, and so on. Such videos appear nice on YouTube, and there are no black bands around the main video area.

 

4. While screen capturing, move around the mouse cursor at a slow speed. Since the viewer mainly follows the cursor movement during screen captures to understand what is being explained, thus fast movement of the cursor may make the video difficult to understand.

 

5. Since there is not much of variation in the videos of captured computer screens, an ideal video should preferably be about 4 to 5 minutes in length to keep the viewer interested.

 

6. If you are not comfortable with recording voiceovers simultaneously with screen recording do not despair. You need to instead record your narration separately and synchronize it with the key screen capture events before merging it with the video. Many video makers do this way because it is also possible to add separate background music to the video.

 

7. Do not be afraid to try out different things for your screen capturing video. The reason is simple. When you do that you get to learn new ideas to make your video look smooth and impressive over time.