The Jing Project, TechSmith’s free-to-download, cross platform screen capture and screencasting tool, has just received some welcome upgrades that make it even easier for anyone to get started in the world of screen recording. I reviewed Jing when it first reared its head, over at Master New Media back in July, and since then the Techsmith team have added some useful functionality to this already useful tool.
If you haven’t encountered it before, Jing Project lets you make screen capture still images of your desktop (or anything on it), or movies of up to five minutes long of the same. This can be really useful if you are trying to show a friend how to do something on your computer, or need to get a point across quickly to a client without laboriously putting it into words and pulling out your hair.
New features include:
- A 3, 2, 1 countdown before you start recording your screencast, so you can get “psyched”
- Onscreen status of whether your mic is on or muted
- No more sign up for Screencast.com when you go to upload your video (this is now dealt with in the app setup)
- Rollover info on the items in your recording history
- Much better access to the HTML embed code, right out of the share menu (my favourite)
As I’ve said before, this isn’t professional screencasting grade stuff - for that you want to take a look at the new Camtasia Studio 5, or upgrade to Final Cut Pro if you’re feeling wildly frivolous and have a lot of time on your hands. But Jing’s beauty is in its simplicity, and the ease with which anyone can make a screencast and share it over the web in a minute or so.
2 Comments
It seems like Jing screen casts don’t honor the scaling parameters during playback. The video always plays at the recorded resolution which means capturing at the lowest resolution.
Have you found a solution for this?
Hi Chris,
Can’t say I have I’m afraid. I think Jing is great for quick, down and dirty grabs to send to a friend or tech support explaining something, but beyond that its limits start to shine through for me.
If you want a bit more flexibility but are still on a budget, you might want to take a look at Camstudio if you use Windows (it’s free and exports to AVI & SWF), if you haven’t already.
On a Mac iShowU is very cheap ($20) and packs in a whole lot of tweakability.The developer behind it has just released a QT and core image effects frontend called Stomp too - great for easy resizing, compression, adding filters.