Screen capture tools

There are lots of interesting tools out there for capturing screen displays along with audio for demo purposes. Camtasia Studio – Screen Recording for Demos and Training looks like a good one for the PC. It allows you to easily add callouts and other features like that. It’s $299, but it’s really tuned for making demos and training materials.

There are some nice low-end options on the Mac. On the way low end, there’s Screen Record for only $20. It will record the screen with audio and save it as a Quicktime movie. That may seem pretty raw, but you combine that with iMovie for editing and Keynote for pulling together the demo, and it’s not such a bad thing.

Snapz Pro X is generally regarded as the creme de la creme of screen capture utilities for the Mac. Lots of options, and lots of polish on the UI. It’s $69.

Update 2/20/05: The current version of Wink doesn’t do audio or video capture, but it does let you capture screen shots and add annotations to make nice, compact Flash movies.

By the way, Joel had a good experience with Camtasia.

Update 8/17/05: I just learned about CamStudio, which is free, does audio and video, does captions, produces AVIs and SWFs and runs on Windows. Oh, and did I mention it’s free!