The Best DVD Editing Software

ScreenCastle.com is a new service. It uses a small Java application to record your screen. Once you are done recording the video is uploaded to ScreenCastle as a Flash format video file (flv). They will give you a unique ID and several codes (embed, forum, thumbnails, download) to share it with your friends and the world.

Here is my first attempt at a ScreenCastle video:

NOTE: The volume is low. The cause is probably a combination of my computer settings and the Java application itself. I do not usually record audio directly from the computer, but if you do, be careful it is properly set up.

The service allows you to record audio from your computer microphone as well. It also allows you to move the recording window even if the recording has already started.

The whole process is very straightforward and the test video above took less than 5 minutes from opening the application to getting the publishing link. That’s incredibly fast!

There are some troubles with the quality, and getting an FLV video makes editing difficult, but all in all it is a great FREE service. As long as you have Java installed and enabled in your browser, you can do a screencast anytime.

Try ScreenCastle now!

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There have been some very accurate complaints on the chroma keying engine of the AVS Video Editor. The AVS people will be notified of this and hopefully the problem will be fixed by their next release.

In the mean time here is a simple process you can do to get better chroma keying for your videos:

1. Open a new project for the video you wish to key in.
2. Make the main video timeline a solid color that does not appear in the video to be keyed.
3. Insert your video as an overlay that fills the entire frame and choose the color to chroma key.
4. With some less than perfect videos, due to the problems with the keying engine, some artifacts will be seen. Do not worry, they will be dealt with in the next steps.
5. Render the video in uncompressed format.
6. Repeat steps 3 to 5 with the video you just rendered until it is properly keyed.

The final product should be an uncompressed version of your video, properly keyed in and with a solid background. You can insert this video into your original project and you will be able to chroma key the solid background easily and without unwanted artifacts.

This process still requires some fairly good quality videos for proper keying, but the final product is usually worth it.

It is important to remember to do all the rendering in uncompressed format and to give the project the correct size to avoid further quality degradation. This requires a big amount of free space for handling all the uncompressed version of the video along the keying process.

Technorati Tags: avs, chroma key, editing, editor, format, keying, overlay, render, uncompressed, video