If you want to create an educational video sharing site, screencasts are an essential component. Since video has become so much more popular and affordable, many content creators are turning from the traditional text tutorial with screenshots to the more information rich screencasting format. If your educational content revolves around a computer, then you really need to be making screencasts to obtain the maximum levels of engagement and sharing.
Put simply, a screencast is a video recording of all or some part of your screen along with audio narration, screen captions, and sometimes a music soundtrack. In the old days, it was a pain to make a high-quality screencast, but both software and hardware has improved to the point where it’s fairly straightforward with the right tools.
If you’re interested in creating effective and engaging content for a video sharing site, then you can’t go far wrong with the following tools.
Windows
CamStudio
CamStudio is a very well featured screen casting application, especially considering that it is free. With CamStudio you can record high-quality video in a lossless format before encoding it to the format of your choice, including Flash. CamStudio is easy to use, but configurable enough to keep tinkerers happy.
Jing
If you like to keep your videos short and sweet, then Jing is probably the tool of choice on Windows. Created by TechSmith, who also develop other screencast and video editing software, Jing is not as full featured as many of the alternatives, but it’s great for recording quick tutorial videos that you can share instantly. Jing is free download, but if you need a more powerful screencasting solution, you should check out Camtasia Studio, from the same developers.
Mac
As usual on the Mac, if you want the good stuff you’re going to end up paying a premium for it, but in this case, you really do get what you pay for.
ScreenFlow
ScreenFlow is probably the most full-featured screen casting tool available on any platform. It can efficiently record crystal sharp video, even on Retina screens. It has an intuitive and easy-to-use interface and packs in a lot of very useful features, like closed captions, chroma key and effects, and professional-quality editing tools.
Screenflick
If ScreenFlow is a little rich for your blood, Screenflick is a more than adequate alternative for all but the most dedicated pros. Of course, you can record your screen and audio, but additional features like live scaling, the capturing of keystrokes and displaying them onscreen, and the ability to create time-lapse videos make Screenflick a very strong contender.
Linux
Vokoscreen
Vokoscreen is a fairly new minimalist screencasting application that uses FFmpeg under the hood. It’s nowhere near as rich and feature-laden as the Mac apps we’ve just looked at, and it can be a little buggy at times, but it has everything the average screencaster needs to create educational video content. If you want to look at the source for Vokoscreen and compile it yourself, it’s up on Github. There’s a PPA for Ubuntu users, which you can use to install Vokoscreen by running the following commands in a terminal:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:vokoscreen-dev/vokoscreen
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install vokoscreen
FFmpeg
Of course, if you want, you can dispense with a GUI altogether and get your hands dirty on the command line by using FFmpeg directly. It’s a bit more time consuming, but using FFmpeg allows you to control and tweak all aspects of the recording process. There’s a useful guide to using FFmpeg for creating screencasts on Ubuntu Guide.
If you have a favorite screencasting application that we haven’t mentioned here, feel free to give it a shout out in the comments below.