CamStudio

Introduction
CamStudio is a very useful utility that records all screen and audio activity on your PC and then saves it using the AVI video format. Apart from that, CamStudio includes a built-in AVI-to-SWF converter which will convert the videos that you produce into standard Streaming Flash videos (SWFs). With all that said, let’s start playing!

CamStudio Installation:
You can download CamStudio from the official website: http://www.camstudio.org Now we will cover the installation procedure:

• Launch the setup
• Tick the “I agree with the above…” checkbox and click “Next”
• Select the location where you want CamStudio to be installed and click “Start”.
• Click “OK” twice.

Now CamStudio is installed and ready to be started.

Let’s have a look at how you can use it.
How to use CamStudio:

First of all, you need to launch CamStudio; go to:

Click on: Start->Programs->CamStudio->CamStudio

This is CamStudio:

• Go to the menu Region and select “Full Screen”. This will make CamStudio capture the contents of the whole screen. You can also specify that CamStudio will only capture a specific region that you will mark; you can do this by choosing the “Region” option in the Region Menu.
• If you want the CamStudio to produce an AVI video then you should click the “SWF” button in the main toolbar once; if you later want to produce an SWF file, you can click again on the “SWF” button and it will switch back to SWF recording.
• As soon as you are ready, click the red Record button. If you have chosen the option “Region” under the main Region menu, you will first be asked to drag an area with your mouse (this is the area where everything will be recorded).
• Everything that you do inside the recording area will be recorded by CamStudio. You can also use the black Pause button if something happens and then you can normally resume the recording without any problems.
• When you are done, click the blue End button in the main toolbar. The recording procedure stops here
• CamStudio will then pop up a dialog asking you to save the file that you have recorded. All you have to do here is to specify a name and then click on the “Save” button.

That’s pretty much what CamStudio is all about. Take some time to play around with it, its fun!

Conclusion
There are many reasons why you would want to use a utility such as CamStudio. For example, you can create vivid internet tutorials, software demonstration videos, videos showing the latest techniques/bugs that you have discovered and many, many more. Of course, CamStudio is not the only software available capable of doing this. In fact, there are many rivals; the majority of which are commercial. In my opinion, if you consider the fact that it’s free, CamStudio is your best choice (again, if you don’t really want to spend any money of course!).