What tools I use for screen capture

When it comes to doing screen captures for my lessons or short tutorial videos for my CCNA classes, I've always relied upon Camtasia Studio to do all these. After I compile the videos, I upload them to Moodle (the LMS that we use in DWU).

All this worked well for short (less than 5 mins) videos of around 852x480 (up to 480pixels) which wasn't pretty bad but at times when you wanted a bit more clarity this wasn't enough. This meant I had to increase the quality of the video which also meant larger file size. Now our Moodle LMS was configured to accept 25MB as the max. capacity for any file uploads.

All these meant I couldn't upload my videos to the course pages on Moodle directly.  I had to look for another alternative, Google Drive and Dropbox did the job perfectly but the downside for me was the internet connection. We have a pretty good internet connection compared to other academic institutions of the same level in PNG; judging by my own standards, well anybody in DWU will agree with me on that. A quick speed test for our internet connection from LAN showed me the following stats:

• DL: 1.67 Mbps
• UL: 1.85 Mbps
• Ping: 75ms 

Heard from the ICT Director that DWU pays for up to 10Mbps, but I think 1.67 is the highest DL I've ever seen. The speed gradually gets slower and slower and can get down to about 1.0 - 0.5. We still have intermittent issues with internet but that I'll probably reserve for a later post.

I've used Camtasia for a while now and I still like using it. However, I've noticed that Camtasia is quite heavy on memory and CPU usage so I decided to look online for an alternative to Camtasia that was light but had similar capabilities to Camtasia.

I came across quite a number of screen capture tools, but I decided to test one out that's called FastStone Screen Capture. It is not free but does give you a 30 day trial to test its features. Once trial period has expired, you must purchase license to use the software.

Comes with an installer and a portable version. I was quite pleased with the portable version as it sits at only 10MB of HD space, doesn't use up too much memory or CPU space. Yet it does a pretty good job than most other screen captures I know of. I haven't bought it yet, I'm still using the trial version but is a sleek tool.

Here is a sample video I captured using FSCapture. 3.35 mins, 992x1272pixels and about 8mb stream size. Video was uploaded to Google Drive and embedded here in this blog.

Compared to a similar video I got from Camtasia, I can confidently say that FSCapture did a great job quickly, with less resources, and doesn't take much to upload. Not bad at all.

So far these are the tools I've used for media and I list them according to preference;

• Camtasia Studio 8.3
• FSCapture Portable
• TinyTake
• Snagit

Don't know what others might be using but if you have a great tool in mind.. Also if it is freeware, open source, feel free to share in the comments.