Free Animated Screen Capture

[John Scheffel]

I was recently investigating applications which can be used to capture animations of Modeling sessions. I support many people in other countries and time zones. It is often faster and easier to answer a question with an animated demo than to write a detailed explanation. It would also be helpful to me if the people I support could provide animated screen captures related to questions or problems.

I discovered that Microsoft offers free download of a utility named Windows Media Encoder. It is used to encode video and audio in the WMV (Windows Media Video) file format. This format can be played using the Windows Media Player which is included with Windows XP and Vista and is also available as a free download for older versions of Windows. WME can be used to:

Capture animations of screen activity in WMV format including audio from a microphone.
Capture video and audio from other input devices to WMV format
Convert other animation/video/audio file formats (such as MPG or AVI) to WMV format.More of a toolkit than a user application the interface is not the most friendly, but it does work well and it is free. If you just want to do simple animated screen captures then WME will do the job.

You can download the install file from www.microsoft.com (http://www.microsoft.com/). Just search for Windows Media Encoder.

I wrote some instructions to help people that I support get started using WME to do screen captures. A PDF is attached.

I also found a reasonably priced tool which is easier to use and provides more features. It is called My Screen Recorder (http://www.deskshare.com/msr.aspx) from DeskShare. You can download a free trial from their web site and the cheapest verison is only $40. It captures to AVI format which creates pretty large files, but you can use WME to convert these to smaller WMV files.

Edit added Aug 28, 2007: Another good low cost option ($39) is SnagIt from TechSmith (http://www.techsmith.com/). It is a very popular tool for capturing and annotating static screen images, but also includes animation capture to AVI files. They also offer a free trial download. For more info see the posts below.

[Ron Keeley]

You might also be interested in the Jing Project: http://www.jingproject.com/

[John Scheffel]

You might also be interested in the Jing Project: http://www.jingproject.com/
Interesting. Have you tried it with Modeling? It appears to be sponsored by TechSmith (http://www.techsmith.com/), makers of the popular SnagIt static screen capture utility which can do AVI animation capture as well. They also sell Camtasia which is a more powerful screen animation capture and editing utility, but at $299 is pretty expensive.

[John Scheffel]

I had tried animation capture from SnagIt years ago and remembered it as being pretty limited. Ron's pointer inspired me to take another look at SnagIt version 8.1 which I am currently using and it is much improved. It is still somewhat limited but comparable to the basic My Screen Recorder tool. MSR seems a little easier to configure and use for animation, but the resulting capture quality is similar. SnagIt would be another good low cost option, plus you get a first class static image capture tool which includes editing/annotation tools and format conversion for static images.

The downside of the default "Record screen video" profile included with SnagIt is that it creates really big AVI files because it captures 15 frames per second. As an example I captured a 972x788 pixel Modeling window for 33 seconds and the resulting file was over 10 MB! This frame rate is probably overkill for screen captures, 5 fps may be sufficient. The frame rate can be changed from the Output Properties form in SnagIt.

However, once you have an AVI file it can be converted using to WMV using WME which dramatically reduces the file size. My 10 MB AVI file was reduced to a 700 KB WMV file which looked almost as good.

Here is a tip for using WME to convert AVI files to WMV. When you run the New Session Wizard you will be prompted to select Content Distribution. It is best to select "File Archive" (see GIF) which will preserve the source file image size. The other options resize the video for the target format which may make the result useless if lines disappear or text becomes too small to read. In my tests the "Medium quality video (VBR 75)" encoding option provided acceptable quality, but if file size is not a concern the higher quality options look better.