How to screencast a drawing?

I received a tablet for Christmas and, because of the birth of my son (yes, I’m very proud and will tell everybody who’ll listen!) I’m just now getting around to experimenting with it.

One thing I would like to do is “screencast” illustrations. However, I would like to do this:

  1. without the cursor being visible as I draw
  2. with only the canvas being visible.

Now, I have tried this (with decent success) by simply using CamStudio, and then Blender’s compositor to filter out any colors that I don’t want. The problem is that, when matting out the cursor color, there is a blob around it at some points. Also, it would seem to me that there would be a way to just record the canvas, directly (hopefully at a reduced color count, and therefore a smaller file size) rather than using standard CamStudio stuff.

So, does anybody have any referrals to online guides, or any other suggestions for recording drawings in real time?

Disable the curser from your OS if you can, or change it’s size so it’s uber small, or download a skin for it so it’s just a dot.
What program are you using to paint in? Does it have a screencast plugin?

on a mac you can screencast using quicktime, and it allows you to select a rectangle from the screen to be screencasted. in your case you would select the canvas on which you draw. to get smaller filesize, just decrease this canvas size a little before starting recording…and, in quicktime, you can select the option to not show the cursor… as the os are very similar today, you might find this option too on your system.

I was using Krita (its drawing tools seemed a little bit better than GIMP’s). As far as I am aware, neither Krita or GIMP have any sort of customized screencast plugin (although it’d be great if they did, obviously).

It seems likely to me that, because both programs have their own unique cursors, changing the default Windows cursor wouldn’t make any difference to the program’s cursor. However, I’ll look into that if I can’t get a good solution, soon.

Yeah, CamStudio does allow for selecting a specific area. That’s what I’ve been using for my precise ones. The problem is that, when drawing, you’re moving the canvas around a lot, and so you basically have to change your drawing practices when you’re doing the screencast. Now that I think about it, this is probably unavoidable. I don’t think it would be possible to have screencast which changed the placement on the fly, based upon a drawing canvas.

So maybe I was getting too greedy with that desire.

Drawing in Pshop:
I use two displays.
Anyway, you can ask Pshop for two windows of the same document.
The one is used for zooming and sketching, the second on the appropriate static whole document. Capture the second one as you draw on the first one.
BTW, this also works for blender, let’s say, when sculpting.

“Pshop”. It took me a minute to realize that that was Photoshop, and not one of the other hundreds of imaging programs.

Your suggestion is a good idea. However, I will have difficulty implenting this because I don’t have two monitors. But I will explore how to achieve it on one monitor with Krita and/or GIMP.

Hi, have you tried

from CamStudio’s main window

‘Options’–> ‘Cursor Options…’–>
select the ‘Hide Cursor’ radial button under Cursor Display.

This is an older Camstudio v 2.6

Don.