Best screen recorder for blender?

Im interested in doing some video tuts, but Camtasia is 300 bucks. Before I make the plunge on that I figured I’d ask everyone if they know of a free/cheaper alternative.

Blenders own built in Screencast option http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Vitals/Screencasts

Other screencast software http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_screencasting_software

Internal for timelapse is great, even regular speed and then overdub later is good too

Moved from “Misc: > Off-topic Chat” to “Support > Other Software”

I have a related question. I’m trying to do an animation at 12 FPS, and in it I want some hand written letters. I want to screencast myself writing the words in MyPaint in full screen, I tried using the free Camstudio, but it doesn’t give me the good results. When I advance the movie frame by frame, it doesn’t capture every single frame (even though I set it for 12 FPS (capturing a frame every 83 miliseconds)

On linux I use Kazam screencaster.Perfect for me and free…

I’m a big fan of FFsplit personally, its a low cpu hungry recorder thats built off the design of Xsplit.
http://www.ffsplit.com/

I just used ‘FastStone Capture’ while YafaRay was rendering out a 1080p. And, I had the entire screen being captured with Speecy open on top of Blender. FastStone is a great little app for 20 dollars and you’re registered for life. Check it out at least.

With the release of OSX Mavericks you can use the built-in Quicktime player to screen record.

On windows I have used Screen Recorder Gold. The free version works fine you just get a little overlay in the upper left part of your window. If you choose this one make sure to pull down xVid codec for recording and set Screen Recorder Gold to use that codec instead.

The screen recorder I use for my tutorials is: BSR screen recorder
No screen recorder is perfect, but this does have a free 30 trial for you to try, and it’s only $50 instead of $300.
Like @Atom suggested, the xVid codec is the codec to use.

I’ve managed to do ok with CamStudio and the Xvid codec… Good enough for YouTube at 1080 around 30fps. It still manages to have the occasional hiccup and sometimes audio desyncs on longer recordings (usually fixable with Virtualdub, has to do with framerate). I think getting it to work depends on settings:

Video Options:
Xvid MPEG-4 Codec
Quality 70
Time lapse: Auto Adjust on

Xvid config:
Profile level: Xvid Home
Encoding type: Single Pass
Target Quantizer: 4.00
Quality Preset: General purpose

Audio input options for Microphone:
Default Input Device
44.1 KHz, stereo, 16-bit
Compression: PCM

Of course YMMV. (Using AMD quad core with WinXP 32bit in my case. CamStudio v.2.00 - the free one. Nothing too special.)

However do keep in mind that sometimes the settings are more important than the software, occasionally the defaults “out of the box” are crap. It’d be like complaining about only getting a plain grey default cube to render because you didn’t know what to do with Blender. For screen recording it seems better to go fairly light on compression so there’s less overhead and a faster framerate. Then compress more in post with the saved video file if a smaller filesize is desired.