Screen Capturing your Computer Screen
Loading a MPG File onto YouTube

Let's say you want to explain to a person how to do something with a computer program. Or maybe you want to go step by step through a slideshow to narrate to them, or to show them a sequence of photos. You can do this all by running software that in essence records what your video screen is showing. Think of it as a video camera pointed at your computer screen - but it's all built right into the computer. You can record the narration with your computer's microphone!

The software I use is !Quick Screen Recorder by Etrusoft. You can download it for free and play with it, to make sure you understand it. It's only $20 or so to buy, so really very cheap. The operation of this is very straightforward. You hit the RECORD button. You do whatever you want to do on your computer, and every single thing is recorded as you go into a video file. When you hit the STOP button, it lets you save that file whereever you want.

The AVI file that it makes can be played immediately by QuickTime. So you can mail that off to people! AVI files are notoriously large, though, so I highly recommend that you bring it into Adobe Premiere Elements or another video editing software and convert it into a MPG file. MPG files are much smaller and easier to work with.

If you have issues with one of your video programs not handling this AVI file properly, there's another software program that is free that will "clean up" AVI files and make them playable anywhere. That is called VirtualDub.

Note that if you're recording moving animation you might want to stay with the default of 200 frames per second - but for more static images, you can go with 100 frames per second and have it still appear quite seamless to the human eye. That makes the file smaller, too!

How to Make a YouTube Video
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