Monday, August 11, 2008

TeacherTechBites Episode 003 - TipCam for Screencasting

Many people are put off by the idea of creating screencasts. Most think it takes expensive software that is hard to use. Today I'm showing the program I use in Windows called TipCam. It's totally free, you can download it from http://www.utipu.com/

By default it recods in flv format. What's this mean? Most video sharing sites convert uploaded videos into a flash video (flv) format for streaming on the internet.

Cool functions include:

  • The ability to zoom in on your video to higlight some point (although it doesn't look zoomed while recording)
  • A pen tool for drawing on the screen while recording
  • You can upload to YouTube directly from TipCam
  • TipCam includes a flv player, so if you download any videos from YouTube (future episode) you can play them with TipCam

Now that said, there are not a lot of user configurable settings. If you like easy to use software then this is a good thing. If you're a serious power user then you might not like this program.

I've only really had one problem with TipCam so far and that was it would not record the screen in one program (Phun) I was playing with. So I had to use Snag-It instead.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Steve, Thanks for writing about this very useful tool.

Steve said...

You're welcome. It's nice to see that I have at least a few people who read my blog.