[How to] Configure and Use Jing Screen Capture Software

Introduction:

If you’re making a video tutorial about a software program, you are probably going to need a screen recorder to make it professional.  What if you’re writing a text tutorial?  If it’s all text, the reader will have a hard time making sense of it, so you’ll want to include some screen capture images, right?

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A friend told me about Jing, which is a free screen capture program.  It can record videos and still images of your computer screen.  Click here to get Jing.

Once you’ve installed Jing, you will see a semicircle that is always hovering at the top of your screen (you can close it if you want).  That is how you access the Jing interface.  Hover your mouse over it, and three options come up.  The first is “capture,” the second is “history,” and the third is “more.”

If you click the Capture button, you can select an area for Jing to capture.  It automatically detects windows, panels, etc., but you can also click and drag to create a custom capture region.

Once you’ve selected a region, this box comes up:

If you click the first box, it will capture an image.  If you click the second box, it will start recording video.

After you’ve captured an image or video, this window will come up:

The WordPress editor is the image I captured.  Along the left side are editing buttons.  Along the bottom are saving options.  You can instantly have them host your image on their server, or you can just save it to your hard drive.

Okay, so now you know how to use the program.  Here are the three flaws I’ve found that it has:

1)  It only lets you record for 5 minutes.

2)  It auto detects the microphone installed on your computer with the name “Microphone” or “Mic”.

3)  You can only save video in flash format (FLV/SWF).

You can remedy that second one by going to your recording device settings and changing the name of your preferred device to Microphone.

If you have any questions, leave a comment and we’ll figure it out.