Recommended screen capture tools

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Pan Athen
SoundFellas Crew
Posts: 76
Joined: 04 Dec 2021 20:51
Location: Athens / Greece
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Hi to all!

To help you communicate your workflows, techniques, or even issues with Echotopia, here are some of the tools that we use to capture our screens at SoundFellas.

We use them to create tutorials for our internal knowledge base, to gather issues for ticket tracking, or even as a quick way to show communicate something between colleagues.

For screenshots (screen image snapshots) we use ShareX, it's a brilliant free and open-source tool, check it out here: https://getsharex.com/

For screencasts (screen video recordings) we use both OBS Studio and Bandicam.

OBS Studio: https://obsproject.com/
Bandicam: https://www.bandicam.com/

Bandicam is a little more straightforward and it's the quickest way to create small files for the kind of sharing we need. OBS Studio is famous and used by a lot of streamers, but it's kind of more advanced to set up and use.

For fast animated GIF captures we also use the lightweight and free LICEcap: https://www.cockos.com/licecap/

Finally, we need to keep our media optimized for sharing and the web, so we use two excellent free utilities that compress our captures before we upload them or share them. Saving size means less storage and energy to transmit, saving time for everybody and the planet's resources. So, media optimization is a must for us!

For image compression we use TinyPNG, it's a free online service with paid plugins for professionals, which you'll never need probably, so the free version is great: https://tinypng.com/

TinyPNG exports both JPEG and PNG, the export format depends on what format you imported. For images that are simple diagrams, or screenshots of windows and dialog boxes with no pictorial imaging, you should use PNG, while for anything that includes pictures and graphics with many differences between neighbor pixels (like a map, an application containing a map/graphics, pictures, etc.) you should use JPEG.

For video compression, we use the lovely and very powerful HandBrake: https://handbrake.fr/

I don't know why it's called handbrake and its icon is exotic fruits and cocktails, maybe it has something to do with the lifestyle of video editors, hehehe!

HandBrake is awesome and it even has some presets for sharing tiny videos with free Discord accounts and other popular sharing channels.

I hope the links above will help you share your experiences better here in our forums or with your colleagues and audience.

Don't hesitate to share your recommendations below!
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