The process of capturing the screenshots of one's activities on a computer continuously and assembling them into a video is called screen-casting.
Take for instance ,while on the Net you need to demonstrate the mail merge facility of a word processing package.Instead of explaining the whole process in words,if you demonstrate the same graphically he/she may understand it better.
With the help of screen-casting software one can easily generate a mail merge screencat and mail it to the client.However, if you are on a public machine this may not be feasible without an on-line solution.
The free on-line service, ScreenToaster (http://www.screentoaster.com/),is one such web-based screen-casting service worth a look in this regard.
ScreenToaster that runs on ayour browser allow s you to generate a screencast video with a couple of mouse cliscks. ONce registered with the service ,log-in to it and simply click on the"start Recording " button. When the system is ready,select the screen area and begin the recording process. Besides adding audio content,screen toaster lets you enrich the scrent-cast video content too (via webcam). Once the screen-cast is created, you cn upload the video to screen-toaster's server or save it locally
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Screenr.com
We all know that the popular's social messaging/microblogging application Twitter has become a prominet communication tool for netizens acroos the globe. An advantage of twitter is theat it lets you send a message to a group of people in on shot.
Many applications, are being built aroun the twitter to expolit its groupcast facility .Screenr (http://screenr.com/) ,the web based screencasting application, is yet another instance of this ever-growing twitter applications eco system. Besides helping you generate a screencast without having to install a program,screenr allows you to instantly tweet it too.
Now, in case your demonstrations are mainly browser base ones (creating a google search tutorial is an apt instance), the screen capture extension, "Capture Fox" (http://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8090) could come in handy. Once integrated with firefox, this extension plants an icon at the bottom of the browser. To capture the screenshots,just click on this icon and select the appropriate option (llike capture area and video qulaity) and click othe icon again to terminate the capturing process.The vidoe generated thus van be saved as an AVI file.
More about this add-on
You can use this tool to capture firefox window or the whole screen and make screencast videos. You can compose tutorials, e-lessons or videos. You can also record your voice.
This extension is for Windows XP and Vista.
Image Gallery
FireShot is a Firefox extension that creates screenshots of web pages (entirely or just visible part).
Unlike other extensions, this plugin provides a set of editing and annotation tools, which let users quickly modify web captures and insert text annotations and graphical annotations. Such functionality will be especially useful for web designers, testers and content reviewers.
The captures can be:
- uploaded to FREE public screenshot hosting
- saved to disk (PNG, GIF, JPEG, BMP)
- printed
- copied to clipboard
- e-mailed
- sent to configurable external editor for further processing.
Screengrab! is an extension that makes it easy to save a web-page as an image – it’s a screen capture tool for Firefox!
With it, you can save anything that you can see in a browser window – from a small selection, to a complete page. You should really download it right now.
Here’s a few examples (that open in a new window) for your perusal…
Basically Screengrab! let’s you take what you want from a web-page: the entire scrollable document, just the visible bit, or a draggable selection. Screengrab will even save just the contents of an individual frame.
Screengrab captures Flash and Java applets as long as you have Java installed.
To use it, just right-click a page to bring up the context menu and look at the options under “Screengrab”. It’s pretty self-explanatory!
For various tasks many of us take a screen images-it could be for enriching a PowerPoing Presentationor could be for writing a tutorial or for something similar to those tasks.Generally, we use "Print-screen" to capture screen. But window screen shot capture has limitations. For instance, it fails if one wished to capture a portion of an application window.The fre open source software Green-shot (http://greenshot.soruceforge.net/) assumes significance here. Once greenshot becomes active, it takes over the PrintScren key and offers an option to select an area of the screen to be caputred. Greenshot caputres the selected part and loads the captured.Grenshot captures the selected part and loads the caputred image on its editor.Now you can edit or add annotations to it adn save its as an image file.
Greenshot is a revolutionary screenshot tool optimized for productivity.
- Save a screenshot or a part of the screen to a file within a second.
- Apply text and shapes to the screenshot.
- Offers capture of window, region or full screenshot.
- Supports several image formats.
