What’s the best software for recording video off your screen? I want to do tutorials but don’t have a very good screen recorder, the one I’m trying now doesn’t give very good quality even at 100% quality and full screen resolution, it’s choppy, and the audio gets funny sounds in it. FREE is best if there’s any good ones out there that are free. So for others that make tutorials, what software do you use? thanks!
OBS is pretty good, although it’s more meant for livestreaming than recording. You can record with it too, it just records in H.264 which isn’t the best if you want to edit it later. If you are on OS X, you can use Quicktime X. Not sure what the best option for Linux is.
What’s wrong with H.264?
It’s a delivery codec. Long story short, it’s designed to maximize the quality:bitrate ratio at the expense of encode/decode performance. If you want to edit, you’re looking at either transcoding it to something more edit-friendly (ProRes, DNxHD, etc), or dealing with the CPU hit of your NLE trying to chop plow through anyway.
I see. But wouldn’t you still want to record in high quality? Even if you edit with a lossy codec, so you can render in HD.
Three I know about for Linux are ffmpeg (or avconv), Istanbul and RecordMyDesktop. RMD in my opinion is best for quality, but trying to interleave sound as you go along (e.g. as you’re talking) is very dodgy, at least on my machine it is. Dubbing the video separately via another tool, though is fine though. Also, you need a LOT of space for RMD recording because it records in a low/no compression format (for minimal CPU footprint during recording), and then reprocesses afterwards.
ffmpeg is also a good tool, very powerful, but it is entirely command-line driven, so if you’re not comfortable with that, you need to find a front end GUI for it.
I’m running windows
Lossy/quality has nothing to do with it. Ideally, you’d set up whatever codec you are using to have sufficient quality to not mess up your output. The question is whether you end up with big files that your editor can parse easily, or small files that it will have to do a lot of math to extract a full particular frame from.
Then you can try WebCamMX or ManyCam. They’re both webcam apps, but you can redirect the feed to your desktop. I think WebcamMX also allows you to record the webcam feed as a video.
For your own sake, please use OBS instead.
thanks… I’ve have looked into OBS and I’ll look into the others too
…and do not forget that Blender has a built-in screencast tool, so if you wish to make Blender tutorials, that could also be a solution.
Depending on the type of software and tutorial, Wink is a great screencast tool. http://www.debugmode.com/wink/
Bandicam! Excellent i use it to make music production tutorials
I have never had problems with OBS It easy to use just works with no trouble. You just get a lot of stuff with it. The free version that is.
Hey, I’m a big fan of FastStone Capture. It saves as a .wmv file and has everything you will probably need. Pause button, save speaker sound, mic sound, or both and you can even edit after recording. On top of that the resolution is outstanding. Free 30 day trial and only 20 dollars to buy for life including any updates of course. Give it a try and I’ll bet you’ll agree.
i use blueberry flashback express. the features are pretty basic but for screen recording it is exellent. you can always upgrade to the pro version if you need to. http://www.bbsoftware.co.uk/BBFlashBack_FreePlayer.aspx
Thanks for the link, this tool looks promising.
MS Expression, which is free now, has a screen recording tool.
Thanks, did not know that.
Greetings,
I just wanted to share a quick blurb about EpicRewind here:
EpicRewind is video capture software that has a key differentiating feature: RAM RollingBuffer mode. This works like an on-demand instant-replay: a game is hooked and the video is continuously buffered in system RAM, when something cool happens the user can save the buffer contents with the press of a hotkey. So rather than saving video from your entire gaming session you can just save the good stuff after it actually happens. In addition, EpicRewind provides some nice performance benefits over traditional capture software: video processing, encoding and writing to disk only happen when you choose to save a video clip. During video buffering, the contents of the framebuffer are just being copied to system memory X times per second based your specified capture FPS.
The base version is free and can be downloaded here: