4

I'd like to make a video tutorial for my SDK--one of those videos that shows the screen while some dude talks about what he's doing. Can someone direct me to easy and preferably free tools for doing so?

Desired features: - Cuts (recording several snippets of video and putting them together afterward) - Subtitles (not only for user convenience but because I'd rather not disturb the other cubicles by talking in a microphone at work :))

(who doesn't like video tutorials?)

Update: I'm using Windows.

Community
  • 1
  • 1
Qwertie
  • 16,354
  • 20
  • 105
  • 148
  • Which platform are you using? As you know, these kinds of things are usually platform specific. – Raymond Martineau Nov 25 '08 at 18:20
  • 1
    For large tutorials or searchable content or copy/paste related stuff I think text tutorials are better. You can skip pages, or copy/paste code directly to see it run. For things like "Hey this is it, and this is what it does" , nothing better than a video and nothing worst than text!! Do both :) – OscarRyz Nov 25 '08 at 21:41

3 Answers3

3

Jing. Free, very easy to use, Windows version requires .NET 3.0 framework. Also, there is Mac version available.

Marko Dumic
  • 9,848
  • 4
  • 29
  • 33
  • I use Jing on a Mac for my video tutorials and it works really well. The UI is easy to use on the Mac. The free version only lets you create .swf files and has a short branding image at the end of the video (they also make it nearly impossible to reformat the .swf to another format.) – MikeN Jun 15 '09 at 15:11
2

Camtasia is very good. I've also used wink, it is flash instead of video, but you can add navigation controls and text boxes.

Jim C
  • 4,981
  • 21
  • 25
  • Wink was the answer for me! It's got a learning curve, and it's more cumbersome to control the rate at which frames are presented to the user, but it has video tutorials and excellent "postproduction" features. – Qwertie Nov 28 '08 at 00:11
  • Oh yeah, and the fact that I can present choices to the user is great ("tell me more about this feature" ... "skip forward") – Qwertie Nov 28 '08 at 00:13
1

a cool tool for screencasting is Camtasia Studio http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp with a free 30 day trial

example : http://static.interspire.com/isc-demo/index.html

Kostis
  • 1,105
  • 8
  • 10