Record the activity on your screen with CamStudio

For different reasons, it can be that we need to do an animated capture of the screen. To do it, we can use a very simple program like CamStudio, which will easily let us achieve our goal.

Before starting the recording, we’ll define the area to record, how we want the mouse pointer to be viewed and if we’ll incorporate sound or not to the CamStudio capture.

To determine the area we need to click on the “Region” menu and 3 options will appear. We select the one we prefer to use, “Region” will let us define it right before starting the recording, “Fixed Region” establishes a fixed recording area, and “Full Screen” records the whole screen. To make the area move with the mouse pointer while we are recording, we access to the “Options” menu and we select the option “Enable Autospan”. By going to Options>Autospan Speed, we can define the reaction speed to the CamStudio movement.

Then we’ll configure how the mouse will look like during the recording. To do it, we access to the “Options” menu and we click on “Cursor Options”. On the emerging window we’ll select if we want the cursor to be seen, its style and if we want it to be highlighted with any geometrical form.

To define CamStudio’s audio recording parameters, we need to go to the “Options” menu and there will be 3 options. To be on mute we need to select “Do not record audio”, to record from the microphone “Record audio microphone” and to record what comes out from the speakers “Record from Speakers”.

Once we’ve done all this, we need to click on the button with the red circle to start recording. During it, we’ll be able to stop it, make changes and continue if we stop it using the pause button. We need to pay special attention to the fact that we have to pause, because by pressing “Stop”, CamStudio saves the file and we won’t be able to edit it.

To add explanatory sheets during the recording, we need to pause in the moment we want to insert it. Once paused, we can act with freedom. We click on the “Tools” menu and access to “Screen Annotations”. On the window that opens up, we’ll define on the “Shapes” eyelash, the shape of the text sheet to be included by double clicking it. Once it’s created, we’ll be able to edit its content doing a click with the right button. We place it where we want and we reload the recording pressing the red button. When we don’t need the sheet anymore, we pause again and right click, and select “Close”.

When we finish the recording, we need to press the blue button to end, getting a window which asks if we want to record. We click on “Yes” and indicate CamStudio the location of the AVI file. Then we’ll be able to visualize the capture on any of the video players that supports this format.