Record screen & build video tutorials.
If you'd like to be able to whip up short videos and post them online but don't quite know where to start, Blueberry's BB FlashBack Express might be the tool for you. It records your screen activity, with sound, and posts finished videos to YouTube and other sites. BB FlashBack Express lets you create instructional videos that record every onscreen step, or narrate a slideshow or series of clips to create your own documentaries and short films. It's designed to be as easy to use as possible without sacrificing the capabilities you're looking for. It's a "best-of" version of Blueberry's FlashBack Standard and Pro tools, offering basic but most-needed features such as recording screen and Webcam images and computer and microphone sounds and saving flies in AVI or FLV format. BB FlashBack Express is freeware that comes with a evaluation period and free registration. That's a bit different, but it lets you try the tool without sharing info. until you're ready, so we approve.
BB FlashBack Express installed two icons on our desktop; one for BB Flashback Express Player and another for BB FlashBack Express Recorder, a simplified tool for quick recording. The Recorder is fully integrated with the Player but can run simultaneously or separately, as we learned when we opened both. FlashBack Express opened with a browser-style user interface with reassuring toolbar entries like Upload to YouTube and Export, but better still was the Welcome screen with large buttons labeled "Record your screen" and "Open a recordings," opposite a series of Getting Started tutorials and a link to the program's Help Manual. The FlashBack Express Recorder is the tool that lets you quickly decide which region of your screen to record and whether to record sound or Webcam activity.
But new users could do a lot worse than simply clicking the Record button and letting the program's wizards tell you what to do (that's a wizard's job, after all). Our quick test video proved the point: Many free screen recorders are more basic than BB FlashBack Express, but very few are so easy to use yet so capable.
Creating demos to show how to use software or to solve particular system problems requires a mix of technical and performance skills. BB Flashback Pro can't give you either of these, but it can handle the mechanics of recording a screen movie, while you concentrate on the information you want to get across.
Screen recorders make a video of everything you do on screen, so the viewer sees the mouse movements and clicks that you make and any text that's typed from the keyboard.
You can also add a narration, explaining what you're doing as you work. BB Flashback Pro can also inset a video, taken with a webcam or video camera.
The software is divided into two parts: a recording module and the player/editor. The small recording window enables selection of source – screen, microphone or webcam in any combination – and the area of the screen you want to record, while the player is a reasonably sophisticated video editor.
During recording, the program helpfully highlights the position of the mouse pointer with a translucent yellow circle and can record a narrated soundtrack, as well as on-screen actions, even on a fairly modestly specified Windows PC. There's currently no Mac version of the software.
If you choose, you can have the software record a webcam video of you at the same time as the screen video, so you can appear as a virtual instructor in a picture-in-picture inset.
Once recorded, the BB Flashback Pro Player shows typical video editing tools, with a timeline of the frames, a soundtrack and a separate line for objects. These objects are mainly speech bubbles, arrows and boxes for annotation.
The program has a good range and it's easy to add text in a variety of sizes and styles, if you prefer to have your viewers read instructions rather than hear a narration.
The software includes multi-track audio editing, so you can run, for example, a narration track and background music simultaneously. It also includes microphone noise-reduction software, though its use needs some practice to avoid artefacts affecting voice quality.
BB Flashback Pro 4's main rival is TechSmith's Camtasia, and there's one ease-of-use feature which this program can't match: SmartFocus.
In Camtasia, when you rest your mouse pointer at a particular point on screen, the software zooms in on that area, so you get a close up of the button or selector you're working with. You can zoom and pan in BB Flashback Pro, but only manually, during editing.
BB Flashback Pro can output to a wide range of video formats and containers, including Adobe Flash, Microsoft WMV, Apple QuickTime and even standalone Microsoft .exe files. There's no pre-defined formatting for Android phones.
There's a lot of support for uploading though, with direct access to YouTube, blip.tv, Coggno eLearning, Revver and Viddler.
The maximum framerate of BB Flashback Pro videos is a healthy 30 fps, and you can reduce this to put less stress on system resources – a simple screen recording needs nowhere near this framerate. The software can record at screen resolutions up to 1920 x 1080 pixels.
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