Produce high quality simple video by screen video capture and editing
There are numerous options for both screen capture and video editing.
The quality of videos captured by many tools is said to be often poor. At least, the video capture by one of the most popular screen capture tools- SnagIt - is unacceptable to me, though SnagIt does a very good job in screen snapshots. CamStudio generates good quality video captures, but its codec is antiquated. The captured video cannot be edited by popular tools such as Windows Live Movie Maker. AVS Editor can potentially be a very powerful tool, but unfortunately, its preview is problematic chronically making editing difficult.
Expression Encoder Screen Capture (XESC) is exceptionally good in producing high quality video captures, but Expression Encoder (XE) understandably is probably the only video editing tool that can handle the output of XESC. XE is a powerful encoder and reasonably good video editor. It may be too powerful hence intimidating to occasional video editing users. Once you are familiar with it, XESC and XE are an excellent suite of tools for video capture, editing and encoding. Well, there is a caveat. They are not the most robust applications. XESC can crash mysteriously, but not in the middle of screen capture. For some encoding methods, XE may not like the capture files generated by XESC, so encoding needs to be changed to accommodate that (usually from double-passing to single passing). When XE is encoding, it uses 100% of all the cores of a CPU, so the computer cannot be used for anything else. A 10-minute video may take XE 10 minutes to encode. If the computer is used during the encoding of XE, XE may mysteriously lose access to certain media files, and the only way to remedy this may be rebooting the computer. In summary, XE needs TLC.
The most practical way to make high quality simple video:
- Use Expression Encoder Screen Capture to record screen.
- Use Exppression Encoder to encode the video to a WMV file.
- Drop the WMV file to Windows Movie Maker and edit it with its all the intuitive tools.
- Save the vide as an MP4 file that can be used in various ways (e.g. YouTube).