Camtasia is awesome. It allows you to record audio and video from your computer screen and upload it to a server for others to view …but you need a server. Now Techsmith has taken a cue from YouTube and Flicker and has come up with a beta that includes hosting (you can save the files to your hard drive as well). Enter the Jing Project. For now it is free, so give it a shot. All they ask is that you give them some feedback. It has a really cool interface and seems to work pretty well. Here is a masterful demo that I put together and uploaded in about 4 seconds.
Darren is a sarcastic, odd, bald man with a very dry sense of humor. He originally hails from Albany, N.Y., but claims Charleston, S.C. as his hometown.He joined the Air Force soon after graduating high school. This decision was made because a) working as a busboy wasn’t quite cutting it, and b) he had zero desire to ever attend college. While in the Air Force, he traveled the world as a Combat Cameraman, documenting both natural and man made disasters in places such as Thailand, Namibia, Armenia, Germany, Panama, Italy, Croatia, Japan, Singapore, and probably more than a few places that have changed names since you began reading this bio. There are many stories about his travels locked away in a vault somewhere and it is said that Samuel Adams holds the key.
While in the Air Force, he was given the opportunity to attend a year-long Video Journalism program at Syracuse University. Much to his amazement, he found that higher education didn’t suck at all. Having been bitten by the education bug, he completed his BS and MA in education and training from Southern Illinois University and Webster University respectively. He then completed his doctorate in instructional technology and distance education form Nova Southeastern University.
Darren currently works as an Instructional Designer at The University of Texas at Dallas and enjoys spending time with his wife, children, dogs and fish. His hobbies include weight training, watching the Texas Rangers (yes, really), and trying to appear smarter than he really is.
As usual, I can’t install this on my work computer. I’ll have to bust out the laptop to see how this works. How does it do with Second Life?
BTW Darren – are you coming to the first monthly EduGeek Journal EdTech Focus Group this Friday? Thai food awaits…..
I did finally get this to install, and I tested it out with Second Life. Not as impressive when capturing something as intensive as SL. Seems like it was capturing about 1 frame per second, which is fine for most Camtasia-ish stuff, but not good at all for moving stuff. Still, it has a slick interface, and the hosting option – so a definite move in the right direction.
The end product of my test was a 2 and a half minute capture of me flying around Angel Learning Island in SL. It was saved to my hard drive as a 160mb SWF (Flash) file. I really didn’t want to sit around and wait for that to upload :)
In the future, it would be nice to be able to adjust the capture settings, as well as the area of the screen you are recording. Also, since it seems to save these as Flash files, it would be nice to see a few editing tools (cut and paste, especially for people like me that tend to fumble around with the controls before we get going). I didn’t record any audio, either. Wonder how that works.
I am so there.
While a far cry from full frame, full motion video, it is a start. I am hoping they will add some basic editing functions as well. I have seen interfaces that allow editing on the hosting server. This gets me daydreaming, how long will it be before all programs and data are hosted by some giant server in the sky and computers as we know them are replaced by drones with snazzy interfaces? Just thinking ahead.