Get moving!

For some time now I have used a cheap and cheerful piece of software to capture screen shots to incorporate in e-learning materials. Snag-It from www.TechSmith.com is one of the best known and will only set you back about £30 for a single licence, but (just like the Radio Times) there are others on the market that do the job equally well. Where Snag-It scores, though, is its ability to capture a sequence of screen shots as a video clip.

Provided that you are careful to restrict the size of the video (ie don't get carried away and try to store more than a 1 minute clip) then you will find this facility exciting to use. Yesterday in Birmingham we thought of capturing process rather than just the end result - think how that would impress the inspectorate!

You could invest in the same organisation's Camtasia Suite for about £250 or Macromedia's Captivate (formerly Robo Demo) for about £270. There is no denying that the advantage of buying in to these products is their ability to store using Flash technology, thus saving considerable space over the normal avi type of video file.

Start off with Snag-it and try it out for the screen shot capture before moving on to video capture. Then download the trial versions of both Camtasia and Captivate before making your own decision as to which one to invest in.

To see more http://www.techsmith.com/
http://www.macromedia.com/