Need to make your own help videos? We just released a beta of the Microsoft Office Labs Community Clips Video Recorder for doing screen video captures of demonstrations that you do.
When installed, it puts an icon in both Office applications as well as in the Windows System Tray. Clicking on it provides a number of recording options such as "Start recording a specific window".
The resulting video capture records screen, audio, and keystrokes into a Windows Media file running at 1.55Mbps with a frame rate of 15fps. You can preview and share the video by uploading it to a central site (MSN Soapbox) or you can email it to someone – see the snapshot below.
BEHIND THE SCENES
For the technically minded, what this tool does is install the Windows Media Encoder 9.0 then automate its execution through what appears to be background shell commands. It does a very good job of simplifying the process of selecting the window to be recorded then enabling numerous publishing methodologies for the subsequent Help file.
A NOTE ABOUT COMPRESSION:
The video recorder does not optimize file size or streaming bandwidth consumption by default. A 35 second clip takes 6.31MB because it is recording in Windows Media 9 Screen Codec & Windows Media Audio 9.2 Lossless.
Lossless? Yes, you read that right: Lossless. The audio is uncompressed and 100% of the quality received by your workstation microphone. Of the 1.55Mbps of bandwidth, 1.31Mbps is dedicated to the audio. The video only takes 233kbps relatively.
PUBLISHING THE CLIP ON THE INTERNET
The idea is that people will create their own video training recordings then post them to the Microsoft Office Community Clips web site – powered by Soapbox. The encoded video will be reencoded to minimize bandwidth consumption.
A demonstration of this is located at:
- DEMO OF COMMUNITY CLIPS PUBLISHING:
http://communityclips.officelabs.com/Video.aspx?videoId=8deb4955-34b4-479a-a67e-f79a1b7cc40b.
DOWNLOAD VIDEO RECORDER: http://communityclips.officelabs.com/Download.aspx
kurtsh
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