Making video demos

From EQUIS Lab Wiki

Making video demos is straightforward. Here's what you need:

• DV video camera (available from EQUIS lab), including
  • Tripod
  • Battery and charger
  • Firewire cable
• PC with firewire card
  • Note PC's work better than laptops, as laptop disk drives are slow and may skip frames when transferring from the camera.
  • The PC should have an LCD display; recordings from a CRT have a banding/flickering effect.

Here's what you do:

• Charge the battery.
• Set up the camera to view the display.
• Rewind the tape in the camera. Be careful you are not overwriting something that someone else needs.
• Do your recording.
• Capture the recording on your PC using an appropriate utility. (I use Microsoft MoveMaker, which comes with Windows XP.)
• Edit the recording using an editing tool. (Again, I use Microsoft MovieMaker for this.)

Or Just Use FRAPS...

The FRAPS utility works very well for programs using DirectX or OpenGL: http://www.fraps.com.

• You need to buy FRAPS, or it will watermark your video, and restrict you to 30 second clips.
• FRAPS avi files are huge, but can be recoded as smaller wmv files using the Windows Media Encoder, a free download from Microsoft

Or just use CamStudio

CamStudio is a free (GPL) screen recorder for use with non-DirectX/OpenGL applications. It is a good complement to FRAPS. Similarly to FRAPS, you will need to compress the resulting files using the Windows Media Encoder

CamStudio worked on XNA applications for me (Wolfe), so it might be worth a try anyway. [1]