Showing your wares off was never as easy as it has been made by Screencasting. A screencast is a movie of your computer screen that is habitually used to demonstrate how specific features of a software are used. Showing people your product will boost its popularity into people’s memory and catch their attention. It is like test driving a car or tasting your favorite sweets before buying them. Here are five tools that will put the spotlight on your product and make screencasting easier –
GoView – Making a screencast is one step, next comes editing it appropriately to appeal the market and target audience. GoView provides some innovative editing techniques, like cutting out video/audio portions and adding title pages. Saved videos are uploaded at the GoView site and links are provided for easy sharing. Since this software is in its early stages of conception, it is free while the product is in public beta, but that also means that it is only available on Windows XP and Vista.
Screenr – With everyone and their uncles on the web, there is no better place to market your product than websites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace. Screenr helps put your screencast videos on Twitter. A five-minute-long screencast is moulded into a shortened link which is shared on the website. One can then add a message and post the link to yit’s feed, and add it to YouTube as well. There are other tools that help share your screencasts on Twitter, but Screenr is unique in the sense that it also creates a YouTube-like profile for each user. All videos are saved on one’s own profile, and a public feed of other users’ videos is available for the user to browse through.
Jing – Push a button, and the world begins to rotate; well it in verity does in the 21st century. Jing gives the user a sun-shaped icon on the upper right hand of the screen, hitting which will open a tool that can be used to mark the perimeter of the shot and start recording the screencast, when one is ready. And, on recording thevideo, the audio gets recorded automatically. One can share the URL from screencast.com or embed the video on the site. Direct sharing on Twitter, Facebook and Flickr by customizing share buttons on one’s Jing dashboard is also possible. The free version of Jing records in the SWF format. Jing pro subscribers have the benefit of recording SWF or MPEG-4 videos, unbranded videos, webcam recordings, and upload them directly to YouTube.
Overstream – Videos will grab attention, but information will be provided by the words one puts with the video. Overstream gives the advantage of adding text to the videos. It lets the user take a video from YouTube or Google Video and add subtitles to it. Adding descriptions can also be done with CaptionTube which can be accessed by one’s Google account.
Screencast-o-Matic – Direct videos from webcams can be captured by the free version of Screencast-o-Matic, without any other software. These videos (up to 15 minutes long) can then be converted into MP4, AVI or FLV files and uploaded to YouTube or saved on the website. One can also highlight a specific portion of the video by a note-taking option that will link directly to that moment. And if one wants to convert the screencast-o-matic videos to any other or put them up without the watermark, a payment of $9 is required to download the pro version.
Screencasting gives the end user various tools and techniques to show many options the web has opened up for entrepreneurs and big companies. It is here to stay, is all I can conclude.
