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.

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