TABLE OF CONTENTS One of the worst desktop video jobs I ever had was capturing browser activity while a user narrated with a cheap PC microphone. The best thing you could say about the project is that the audio didn't sound bad. I got involved after the screen footage was recorded in AVI format but before final compression. Eventually the project was scrapped.
One problem was that, during screen capture, the browser was set to full-screen on an 800 600 desktop. Things might have been salvageable if viewers were required to set their desktop resolution to 1,024 768 desktop for playback, but we had no such luxury. The average user without proper instruction will play an 800 600 movie in the Windows Media Player on an 800 600 desktop which, in this case, wouldn't fit and would cause image distortion.
We cropped; we scaled; we tried to ignore scroll bars; nothing made the client happy. It didn't help that the web site itself (the one navigated by the browser in the captured video clips) was designed at 800 600, but that issue could have been addressed by an experienced producer prior to project execution. This chapter presents several screen capture examples based on prior planning and the WM9 Screen codec a very powerful tool if used wisely, even for low bandwidth web delivery.
Windows Media screen capture has been around since version 7, and there are some excellent third-party competitors, such as TechSmith's Camtasia (http://www.techsmith.com). According to information published on the Microsoft web site, the Screen codec specifically addresses...
