Screencasting Tips and Tricks
Tips and Tricks to make good screencasting - Screencast demonstration

Record Desktop - Record any area of your desktop

DemoCreator provides flexible recording area selections when you start to record the desktop:
Application option to record actions on a selected application window;
Custom Size to record actions within a specified area on the screen;
Full Screen to record actions on the entire screen.

Which portion on the desktopdo you need to record? It depends on what you want to show. The main principle is to make small streaming movie to show what we want to show. Unnecessary portions on the screen recording make the final movie file bigger, increasing both the time required in loading and playing. So we will just select the necessary area for desktop recording. There are some rules to select the recording area of your desktop:

Record application window

If the software operation you want to record is in one window and there are few dialog boxes or pop-ups that show up out of the recording scope of the recording window, select this option is fine. Dialog boxes and pop-ups will only display if they are in front of and smaller than the main window. Anything which extends outside of the boundary of the main window will be cut off. Try to run your application to see would it be OK to make the application window as the recording area. Also keep in mind that the default size of the publishing movie will be the same as your application window. To make it play in a smaller playing area, it is recommended to restore down the application window and do your recording. Or you can change the publishing dimension in the setting dialog box. After that, you may add the zoom objects to zoom in to emphasize the details for the resized slides. Select the application you want to record on your desktop, and snap to it, then you can start your recording.

Record the custom size

If you want to record a part of your desktop activity, you can customize the recording area. Any operation like the mouse curse and keystroke on that area will be captured. This is an easy way to set the recording region and aspect ratio for your video and make it right for the player or Web page where you want to show the movie. Furthermore, there are some pre-set dimensions for desktop recording: 800*600, 640*480, 400*300. Do some recording rehearsal to make sure you getting everything you want to show to happen inside that region. You set the exact size by typing in the pixels data in the setting entry, and you can drag the rectangle to position the recording area.

Recording full screen

This option is for you to capture everything that happens on your entire screen. Compare with small area recording, it will take up more computer resource and create a bigger file. However, that if there is a really high resolution monitor for full screen recording, you probably don’t want to create a video file that has to be played back at the same resolution in a really big player. If possible, lower your screen resolution before you start to record your desktop. For example, if you use the screen resolution of 1026*768 or higher, you can adjust the resolution as 800*600 and do you recording. And if you want it to show in a smaller player like 640*480, you can resize the movie dimension as 80% of the original one. So you can publish the video of smaller dimension, but it could be a little blurring. However, you can add the zoom object to magnify the import area of your recorded desktop to show the specific details. You can even set the zoom objects through all your recording slides.

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Posted at 01:28AM Jul 08, 2009 by Chinier Fu in Screen recording software usage  |  Comments[21]