- Posted by justin on February 12, 2007
I was watching an episode of DNR TV (http://www.dnrtv.com) last week and it got me thinking about how I could do something very similar at work for the technical presentation that we sometimes give. I know that quite a number of times, I have found out after the fact about a presentation another group has given on a topic that I am interested in and wished that they had recorded the session.
The way that DNR TV records what is going on, on the desktop of the person being interviewed is using Camtasia (http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp). I look at using Camtasia but the cost is a problem since we would need multiple licenses for the product and without having tried to record presentations before, it is hard to justify putting out money.
So what am I to do? Well, I just happened to be reading some blog this weekend and ran across a product called Cam Studio (http://www.camstudio.org) that is open srouce and free for commercial use. So I quickly download the program to give it a try. Within 5 minutes I had it installed and had created my first video with it. The program is incredible simple to use. It allows you to either record the full screen or a given region. The only thing that I did notice is that there is no option to record at a lower resolution than the monitor is currently running. I am sure that I could fixed this during post-processing. This product also creates flash movies in addition to the avi's and will convert the avi output to a swf movie.