Record Screen Activity: Take Screenshots or Full Motion Recording

There are two recording modes in DemoCreator: Take screenshots and Full motion recording. What recording mode you need? It depends on what
activity on the screen you want to record. For standard application, Take screenshots recording is nice. For really changes on screen, full motion recording is better option.

Take screenshots:

This recording mode works great at recording standard application like MS Word, Excel or Internet Explorer, where there's not a lot of animation and moving images. This mode will do very little impact on your PCs performance. With this option, you can select to record more actions like cursor movement and keystroke and edit them later. Furthermore, you can generate Auto-text and mouse click animations to illustrate your screen recording.

The recording movie is divided as multiple slides, and slides are generated based on the mouse clicks and keystrokes. Basically, one mouse click or a series of keystrokes generates a slide. So each slide lasts only a few seconds. You can click and drag and edit various objects for your recording.

You can adjust the length of the slide and its show order and edit it in the time line, but it may cause some synchronization problem between video and audio. It is recommended that you record the audio with the audio editor after editing the slides and there is no more adjusting to the time line. If there is no audio in the recording, it is free to adjust the editing objects and the time line.

Full motion recording:

Full motion recording will record the really changes on your screen. It records the onscreen changes even you don't move your mouse or there is no keystroke. So it can be used to record some playing animation movie (SWF, FLV, AVI) and some actions like dragging and scrolling on screen. It records a few screenshots in a second and combines them as a movie. The default recording setting is 25 FPS(Frame per Second) . Record a large area with full motion recording mode need to collect a lot of data and it consume much resource of the computer. If the computer can not support that high FPS, the FPS will be lowered automatically. So to improve the recording effect, you can do some settings to optimize the computer performance.

If you are going to capture full motion video, disable your computer's hardware acceleration beforehand. That will make your computer runs more smoothly in recording. There is a screencast to show you how to disable hardware acceleration:

A basic rule is that if there are many screen actions like dragging and scrolling, or there is animation movie on the desktop, Full motion recording is better option to show your recording. But if you want a smaller streaming movie and more auto-generated editing objects to decorate your screen recording, Take screenshots recording mode can fit your needs better. To show the necessary actions like dragging and scrolling actions but also reduce the file size, you can combine the two recording modes together with the Import project feature.

More tips to make effective screencasts

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.

Screencast: How to lower the monitor resolution

More tips to make effective screencasts

Screen Recording in Computer Teaching and Training

In the production of multi-media courseware presentation, we often need to capture the computer screen actions of operating the application, such as tracking the movement of the mouse and the keystrokes from the keyboard, and so on. That is to make a multimedia animation presentation document from your onscreen activity. And they can be used for software training and self-learning. The research shows that screen recording applied to teaching and training receives a good result.

Multi-media technology like screen recording can be used to create virtualized scenarios combined with driven tasks for breakthroughs of the keys and difficulties in teaching. Students can view the screen recording documents online or on their computer screen. They explore independently, and exchanges opinions mutually. They work as partners to complete learning tasks, while teachers guide and support them in a timely and professional manner.

Let’s say that the teacher is having the course of how to make a good PowerPoint presentation. He shows the students the operating steps and tips with screen recording courseware and then arranges the task.

He prepares a detailed demonstration of software video tutorial recorded from computer screen (Flash video files recorded by DemoCreator). Via multi-media teaching system and network, the software video tutorials can be posted to the learning management website and the desktop machines of students. And students can watch the tutorial and operate the application at the same time, and communicate with teacher and exchange opinions with other students readily. So the teacher has enough time to understand the learning process of more students, and guides them to learn better. For some unexpected operational problems, teachers can produce tutorials and send to students to support their learning online.

There are many benefits of screen recording on computer teaching and training:

1. Fully reflect the subjectivity of students, and drive the entire class to complete the task and explore more.

2. With the video tutorials recorded from screen, it breaks restriction of time and space in learning. Usually, students listen to the teacher in the class, and then go to practice. If they don’t focus their minds, some operations or main points may be unable to grasp. And it is not practical for teachers do repeat the course. Screen recording provides a convenient way to help students to learn and explore, no matter in classes or in extra-curricular.

3. All levels of students are taken in consideration. There are some differences of learning progress among Students. It is more conducive for different levels of students if there are detailed video tutorials. Students who master fast and do some deep exploring while students who master slowly can spend more time and opportunity to consolidate their learning.

4. A big help for teachers. There will be more time for teachers to manage and guide students in computer course learning. And there will be more time for Students to collaborate with peers, and more opportunities for exchanges opinions with their teachers.

5. Screen recording documents can be done by both extra-curricular and in class. The screen recording documents need to be prepared before such computer courses. If necessary, teachers can install the screen recording software to help students deal with some unexpected problems in class. On-site recording and distributing is a necessary complement for pre-class preparation improvement.

6. In favor of post-production and application. The screen recording documents used in class can be improved in accordance with the learning performance of students because of the post-editing and publishing features of screen recorder like DemoCreator. So that teachers can make better screen recording documents, and they can be used for other classes or for the next year.

There is a sample video tutorial to show you how to add audio file to PowerPoint: