For the final projects in my two most recent graduate courses, I needed a way to record some demonstrations of using some online tools.  After some consideration, I decided to create screencasts of my demonstrations.  I did some searching for screencasting tools, but ultimately decided on Jing for a few reasons.  First, Jing is free (more on this later).  Second, it runs on Macs as well as PCs (important, because I was using a Mac for my demos).  Third, based on past experience with Jing, I knew that I could save the screencasts as video files on my local computer.

Using Jing can be a bit jolting at first if you’ve never seen it in operation before because it doesn’t follow traditional GUI conventions.  Jing “lives” in the upper corner of your screen as sunburst that expands when you mouse over it.

The first image above shows Jing slightly expanded, while the second shows the interface in its ready to use state.  Clicking on the crosshairs allows you to choose the area of your screen that you want to capture and if you want to record video or capture a still image.  Jing also allows you to narrate video captures.  The gears icon takes you into the preferences for the application.  There really aren’t too many options.  Jing lets you choose a video format (more on this in a bit), select an audio input device, and setup hotkeys for captures.  That’s about it for the preferences.

Once I got over the shock of the interface, I found Jing to be very simple to use.  Making a screen cast is as simple as selecting an area of your screen (or an individual window) and hitting the record button.  One very nice feature is the ability to pause and resume a recording in-progress.

Jing is offered in two versions.  The free Jing and the paid Jing Pro have several features in common.  Both allow you to take still images in PNG format, capture video in FLV format, and include 2GB of storage/bandwidth for online sharing.  The paid version gives you the option to record video in MPEG-4 (H.264) format, removes Jing branding from your content, adds webcam recording, and lets you upload video directly from the app to YouTube.  Jing Pro is $14.99/year.  I ended up purchasing the Pro version solely to gain access to MPEG-4 recording.  MPEG-4 is a much higher resolution than FLV and playback of FLV files can be a bit problematic.

The included Screencast.com access is very convenient for sharing your Jing screencasts with others.  After you record a screencast, Jing gives you the option to immediately upload it to your screencast.com account.  You can also save the video locally.  If you can also upload content to screencast.com later, using a web interface.  I was even able to upload a video I had created using another program to this space.

Screencast gives you several options for sharing your content with others.  You can create folders to organize your files and set them as public or hidden.  Each of your files is also given its own URL that you can share as well as HTML embedding code that lets you post your video on a website or blog.  Below is one of the screencasts I created for one of my projects as an example.