The aim of this page is to give a super simple quick-start for recording screencasts of your work.
A screencast is simply a video recording of your screen as you interact with your software. This may, or may not, depending upon the situation, include a voice-over of you describing what you are doing.
Screencasts are straightforward to record on most major platforms. This guide will prioritise free solutions that are built-in to platforms, followed by free, installable options. There are also commerical solutions but that will remain outside of the remit of this guide.
Each of the following is fine for recording a simple screencast:
- Windows 10 includes the game DVR feature. You can use the "Win+G" shortcut to access the game bar and "Win+alt+R" to start/stop recording. More info here: https://www.howtogeek.com/183231/how-to-record-your-desktop-and-create-a-screencast-on-windows/
- Windows 11 you can also use the "Snipping Tool" (as well as using the XBox Game Bar as for Windows 10. More info here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/learning-center/how-to-record-screen-windows-11
- Mac OS enables screen-recording via the QuickTime Player application. Access the feature either by launching Quicktime or by using the "Cmd+Shift+5" shortcut. Once you've recorded your screencast. Open the resulting mov file in quicktime then re-export it using the 480p option to reduce the size of your submission. You also have iMovie available to edit and encode your video if necessary.
- Linux - there is sufficient range of Linux distribution but such ease of software installation and management that we refer you to the list of installable solutions below.
- Open Broadcaster Software (OBS Studio) - This runs on Linux, macOS and Windows and is your one stop shop for pretty much all your video/screen recording and live streaming needs.
- SimpleScreenRecorder (https://www.maartenbaert.be/simplescreenrecorder/) - On the linked page scroll down to the download section and use the package management invokation for your platform, e.g. $ sudo apt-get install simplescreenrecorder if you're on Debian or Ubuntu.
- Microsoft PowerPoint - If you have this installed then recent version include a screen-recording feature. See this Twitter post/video for more information. Ostensibly this is to enable you to record videos for embedding directly into a presentation but also includes facilities to enable you to export your screencast in various formats.
Bear in mind that whatever software you choose will likely record by default the entire screen, at maximum resolution, and with a high bitrate. This leads to large, and sometimes very large, file sizes, anything from a few megabytes up to multiple gigabytes. At least for my modules, I am perfectly happy with a lower quality screencast. For resolution, 480p, or 720p at the most, is more than sufficient.
If you're interested, handbrake is a greatGUI tool for re-encoding a video file into different sizes, formats, resolutions, and bitrates. Similarly, a swiss-army knife for video encoding is FFmpeg, but this is command line only.
- First, do a test recording. This is an opportunity to both practise what you want to say, and to see how large the resulting file will be.
- If there's an option to reduce the bit rate, then do so. A high bit-rate is necessary for Hollywood action movies but a screencast of a web-app is mostly static in comparison.
- 480p resolution is usually perfectly fine. I can still see the screen and read the text. Remember that I'm also iewing your live website, so the screencast visuals need not be perfect.
- If there's an option to choose only the window in which your browser/website is running, then select just that. There's no need to record the rest of your desktop, especially if you're on a massive, high-resolution screen.