SkillCasting

There are a lot of great screen capture & screencasting tools out there. There’s one that has a permanent place in my toolbox though. It’s Jing.

Jing makes it simple to capture and share both screen capture images and screen casting videos. It’s not meant to replace a more full featured application like ScreenFlow because it’s limited to only 5 minutes of recording time and there isn’t a way to edit your video. I consider Jing to be one of those quick down & dirty tools that just gets the job done.

[View iPhone version]

What makes Jing so useful is it’s tight integration with Screencast.com for hosting. This combination makes it easy to share images and movies without having to know a thing about FTP settings. And from a workflow standpoint, when uploading to Screencast.com, Jing will automatically copy the URL to your clipboard so it’s easy to share in an email, text message, or on Twitter.

Jing is free, but for $15 a year you can upgrade to the Pro version that includes the ability to record MP4 videos in addition to the standard Flash video. And, you can post to YouTube.

A basic Screencast.com account is free too and maybe more than sufficient for casual users. If you’re providing a lot of screencasts, a paid account offers much more storage and bandwidth. It’s only $10/mo. and offers 25Gb of storage and 200Gb of transfer. And it doesn’t limit commercial videos like the terms of service of some other hosting platforms.

This video introduces you to Jing. In the movie, I do the following:

• Share 5 real world Jing examples.
• Show you how to create screen captures & screencasts.
• Share 5 tips for you to get the most out of Jing.

Jing and Screencast.com are from TechSmith. They’re the developers of SnagIt and Camtasia. They’re a solid company and have great support too. Jing works on both Mac’s & PC’s too.

I encourage you to take a look at Jing. Let me know if it’s earned a place in your toolbox too.

[Update: By the way, the video on this page inserted using HTML5. In modern browsers it should play just fine. In Firefox and a few others, it should drop down to a Flash player version. If you have problems, please let me know. Thanks.]

I’ve been working with a client who needs to update a couple of hundred screencasts. In addition, they need to make Spanish and Chinese versions. This is no small undertaking by any means!

The original versions were narrated Camtasia videos. If we were going to localize these for different audiences, we had to develop a better process. We needed to make sure we could translate the video narration and easily swap out the language track. I put together a simple 5-step process to bring consistency to our development efforts.

I was reminded of this by what Mozilla faces with their screencasts. In a post, they talked about having to provide support in 70 languages. I commented on my process for my customer and realize this process isn’t feasible for 70 different markets. But if you need to customize your business screencasts into a couple of different languages, this works well.

If you’re developing screencasts, you’ll find this process standardizes your workflow.

[View iPhone version]