Best screen video capture software?
 

I want to capture to video what I see on my PC monitor, or parts of it.

That is, I want to capture VIDEO, not still screen shots. AVI or MPEG I guess is preferred.

I have found several utilities for this, but wonder if they are any good since the price only ranges from $10-$60 for the software(?).

I want to capture footage from the screen and be able to edit it in Avid or Premiere fairly easily, and intersperse it with DV footage. This means that I will have to shrink the image, or only record what would fit on an NTSC screen, but that's fine I guess.

Do any of the usual editing apps, etc. have this functionality either natively or via a plugin? Can anyone reccomend the highest quality software to accomplish this task (or maybe a few so I can choose)?

What I have in mind is capturing some very specific video (like say the WinAmp visualization window) and using it interspersed w/ other DV footage without looking TOO different (I have seen video screen captures that just looked awful - pixels everywhere, etc.)

Right now it looks like River Past's Screen Recorder Pro might be the front runner.

Thanks!

Alex F

Have you considered Camtasia Studio?
 

I use the product that River Past compared itself to, Camtasia Studio from TechSmith. I use it mainly for corporate tutorials. It's very full-featured and you can download a trial version.

I edit the footage in Premiere Pro. I have not mixed it with regular video. You can see a bunch of Premiere Pro tutorials captured by Camtasia Studio over at Wrigley Video.

Thanks for the reply. I noticed last night when looking at tutorial CD sites that one of them that looked really nice in terms of picture quality, had Camtasia running in his task bar as well.

I'll check it out and start downloading the demos for these and try to comapre them.

Anyone know if FRAPS will capture a windows desktop? It is geared specifically towards capturing full screen avis of PC game footage, so it probably has decent quality, but not much configurability (I am just guessing here).

Thanks,

Alex F

....for me the best capturing tool is screen Vidshot
But theres one more tool that not only captures video from screen,but also alloows to add amusing callouts.

Both camtasia and macromedia captivate work very well for this.