Hi,

I know many people in this community create video tutorials using screen capture.

What are the best programs to do it with?Are any of them available for free?

What do you use to capture what you do on screen and what do you use to edit it for the final tutorial - add comments, text, voice, music, speed up portions of it, etc.

Also, I'd like something that would draw attention to the moving mouse on the screen. Is this something that needs to be done after the video is captured, or do screen captue programs have an option of adding some effect/highlight to the moving mouse?

Thank you!

if on a Mac, SnapItPro,.. PC.. you'e on your own :blink:

Thank you. But I am on PC...

hmmm wonder what Mark uses... he did a bunch of tut's and videos,... he should have a few ideas... oh wait, think he uses a mac too.. :(

Check out ScreenHunter. As I remember it, it's free or at least you can test it for free. I think it might do everything you need.

I use a bunch of different ones, depending on the workflow of the businesses that hire me to make tutorials. Personally, I use Camtasia. It's really robust and does the things you highlighted. PC/Mac It is also wired to push to social media/video sites. 

Some of the editors don't like it because, in the traditional editing world, Camtasia uses an variable rate of capture which is dependent upon screen activity. For personal stuff or only editing within Camtasia itself, this is not a problem. Variable rate helps keep the files sizes smaller but is problematic to work with in programs like Affter Effects or Final Cut.

BBFlashBack http://www.bbsoftware.co.uk/

Its similar to Camtasia. They have a free version, that will highlight the mouse pointer and flash on mouse clicks in the basic functionality. There are many compression options, including constant bit rate, variable bit rate and lossless.

There are 2 paid versions that have more advanced functions and you can view a comparison of all the versions on their site.

Like Camtasia, BBFlashBack records frames, and can be edited as frames in the paid versions

Thank you, lsrgroup, Mark and Chris for the suggestions. I'll check out all 3 to see what fits best.

And thank you for listing things to look out for! I have to sit and think what future steps I need to consider even before starting.

For my YouTube Video CG tutorials, I've been using http://camstudio.org/ and then using VirtualDub to convert to DivX for video editing and uploading as MP4.