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Ask HN: What do you use for Screencasts?

11 points by _b8r0 ↗ HN
Hi everyone. I'd like to sort out a screencast for the upcoming beta of minklinks (http://www.minklinks.com/) before I launch. It's a fairly easy tool to use, but I wanted people to see what it looks like before signing up. What do you use for screencasts and why?

18 comments

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jawns
I've used Jing for short (under 5 minute) screencasts, and it's been great. I think if you go over 5 minutes, you need to upgrade to the paid version.
mikelbring
The paid version doesn't give you more then 5 minutes, it just lets you save the raw video rather then a flash player. They do this because the company that owns Jing (TechSmith) sells a high end screencast software.
Shooter
I use ScreenFlow (from www.Telestream.net) because it is fairly intuitive and has all of features I would ever need. It is also made by a company that has strong experience in the video arena and I think it benefits from the development of its (higher-end) product siblings. I want to spend as little time as possible on the technical aspects of screencasting, so that I can focus on my product/service and content. ScreenFlow handles the transitions, audio ducking, custom cursors, callouts, editing, encoding, titling, etc. etc. without making me open up other apps.
robwgibbons
I used to use ScreenToaster, but it stopped working in Chrome on Linux for me. Screencast-o-matic seems to do the job.
_b8r0
Thanks for the response everyone. Just to clarify I want to take a screencast, prepend some pre-generated video, append pre-generated audio and dub a separately recorded audio track. Ideally I'd do this in something quick like iMovie unless anyone knows of anything better.

Features that would be nice to have would be zooming in on particular areas and zooming out.

sitmack
Screenium is great for capture (on the mac). For editing I use after effects. iMovie would probably work really well. The most important thing is sound and the font size / screen size. Preview it a bunch with fresh eyeballs.
adelegb
Not sure if you are using Mac or PC, but for Macs I am a big fan of Camtasia. It has been very intuitive to use. They have a solid free trial that you can play around with also. I had never done video editing and I was up and running making tour videos in a day, here is the product of my work:http://help.bettermeans.com/home
bmelton
I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned yet, but I always figured Camtasia was the gold standard for this sort of thing.

It's $99, so perhaps the better-priced alternatives are the ones being suggested, but it's really quite impressive.