Creating screen shot movie

I submitted a bug report to Adobe regarding Audition CC 2014. The service
people asked asked me to submit screen shots to show the problem. I've
done that before, but but they were always static. Now I need to make a
couple of short (10s) movies showing the application in operation. Is
there any native capability in Win 7 to do this? (I doubt it.) If not,
what would you recommend?

TIA
Jason

"Jason" wrote in message
...
I submitted a bug report to Adobe regarding Audition CC 2014. The service
people asked asked me to submit screen shots to show the problem. I've
done that before, but but they were always static. Now I need to make a
couple of short (10s) movies showing the application in operation. Is
there any native capability in Win 7 to do this? (I doubt it.) If not,
what would you recommend?




Nothing native in Win7. EZVid records what is on your screen.
http://www.ezvid.com/
--

~Bruce

Jason wrote:
I submitted a bug report to Adobe regarding Audition CC 2014. The service
people asked asked me to submit screen shots to show the problem. I've
done that before, but but they were always static. Now I need to make a
couple of short (10s) movies showing the application in operation. Is
there any native capability in Win 7 to do this? (I doubt it.) If not,
what would you recommend?

TIA
Jason


For a short movie, CamStudio is pretty simple to use.
The reason it's not good for a long movie, is the 4GB
limit on its working AVI output. The output will be corrupted
if it goes over 4GB. It can't make an AVI 2.0 that can be
read. In my modest collection of tools here, only FFMPEG
knows how to make an AVI 2.0 OpenDML movie.

The Camstudio frame rate is a bit weird. If you leave the default,
the tool deceives you into thinking it is recording at 200FPS.
When the actual frame rate is 7FPS, and frames are repeated
around 30 times each, to get up to the 200FPS level. From a
Nyquist point of view, if it only records at 7FPS, then 14FPS
to 20FPS (allow some sampling jitter), might be more appropriate
setting. Just so the movie editor you use for post-processing,
doesn't go bananas. So just select something which you feel
is consistent with normal movie recording (24FPS or 29.97FPS
might be good). Because it doesn't really record at 200FPS.
It's not that good.

*******

I've used FFMPEG to do screen capture, and my record for that,
is to capture at 90FPS (i.e. async to actual screen updates,
and an attempt at oversampling - I was studying sample rate
jitter, and the software has a serious jitter problem). While
some screen capture tools claim to be "adaptive", I've not
seen any evidence that such a thing is happening. It doesn't
look like any of them hook or know about VSync.

With FFMPEG, you start with getting it to dump the name of
your sound hardware. The first command gets the name, which
is all that is really necessary. The second command is if
you're bored.

ffmpeg -list_devices true -f dshow -i dummy # Get sound chip

ffmpeg -f dshow -list_options true -i audio="SoundMAX HD Audio" # Get channels

There can be issues with lip-sync, if recording a movie
off the screen. For your video only needs, think of
all the problems you won't have...

This would be all one line, and run from Command Prompt.
A command like this, can use all the CPU
cores for the MJPEG codec, so if you have four cores,
it can compress four MJPEG frames at once. Whereas you feed
"offset" to the program, to tell it where to record, with
CamStudio it is point and click to capture stuff. I'm not
really a fan of MJPEG, because of "ringing" which leaves
fringes, but still, it's fast. Using HuffYUV would be better,
or perhaps Lagarith, but those are a bit hard on the CPU, and
that means no amazing frame rates. This is all pasted
onto one line.

ffmpeg -offset_x 0 -offset_y 480 -video_size 720x480 -framerate 60
-f gdigrab -i desktop -f dshow -sample_rate 44100 -i audio="SoundMAX HD Audio"
-vcodec mjpeg -acodec pcm_s16le out.avi

But for the sheer ability to experiment, FFMPEG is fun.

I really wanted to edit CamStudio source and fix it up a bit,
but it looks like the source made available, does not match what
was used to build the binary. After wasting a week getting it into
Visual Studio Express, an entire source file was missing.
(There was an include, with no matching file. I was
dead in the water.)

Summary: I recommend this, because you just want to get on with life,
and not spend a week re-inventing the wheel. If 7FPS isn't
enough for you, then more work will be required.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camstudio

Linux has one screen capture, which I was testing on movies. I had
a lot of trouble with audio on that one. In one of the Linux
groups, someone mentioned another tool that might not be
in Package Manager, that was supposed to work better. As well, the
one with the busted audio, also happened to make bad AVI files
(the same "corrupt movie" if over 4GB in size).

FRAPS is a commercial product for movie recording on Windows.
It has trouble with Windows 8, because of the feature set.
FRAPS is one of the few programs that records from any
video surface, and I think Windows 8 broke that. What FRAPS
does, is place some sort of plugin, in every program folder.
That's what the trial version I attempted to use one day
was doing. And it made my Kaspersky AV subscription totally
lock up the computer :-) FRAPS has been used by gamers
in the past, to record from the 3D plane. With a decent OS
choice and a copy of FRAPS, it should "just work".

If using Camstudio, and wishing to record a Youtube movie,
if you turn off hardware acceleration, the video is rendered
on a plane that Camstudio can record. So even if you get
"black box syndrome" while recording, there may be a fix for it.
Some movie players have annotation plane, VMR7, VMR9 as render
options, and fiddling with that makes the movie visible. But
FRAPS is supposed to be the star at that sort of thing, for
as long as you don't use the latest OS (secured against
capture...) .

Paul

On Tue, 02 Jun 2015 22:38:56 -0400 "Paul" wrote in
article
Summary: I recommend this, because you just want to get on with life,
and not spend a week re-inventing the wheel. If 7FPS isn't
enough for you, then more work will be required.

Thanks, Paul. 7FPS won't do it. The problem I'm reporting has to do with
ugly display artifacts (when audio scrolls) that are present in the
newest version and never were before, so I need something that will catch
that behavior. I wonder what would happen if I were to point my dslr at
the screen and record video on it - nothing good I suspect. In the end,
it's probably best if I can convince Adobe just to try the new and
penultimate versions and see for themselves. Before I do that, I'll take
a swing at creating a video.

Jason

Jason wrote:
On Tue, 02 Jun 2015 22:38:56 -0400 "Paul" wrote in
article
Summary: I recommend this, because you just want to get on with life,
and not spend a week re-inventing the wheel. If 7FPS isn't
enough for you, then more work will be required.

Thanks, Paul. 7FPS won't do it. The problem I'm reporting has to do with
ugly display artifacts (when audio scrolls) that are present in the
newest version and never were before, so I need something that will catch
that behavior. I wonder what would happen if I were to point my dslr at
the screen and record video on it - nothing good I suspect. In the end,
it's probably best if I can convince Adobe just to try the new and
penultimate versions and see for themselves. Before I do that, I'll take
a swing at creating a video.

Jason

Do you have an SSD ?

I don't have one, and I'm too lazy to set up a large
RAID0 (you can put four drives in RAID0 and get
500MB/sec).

You could use FFMPEG, capture the whole screen, and use
a RAW format (no MJPEG). Basically, it then becomes
a giant "plumbing limited" capture.

The only problem with the concept, is attempts to take
FFMPEG RAW movies into other tools, usually results
in tears. But if I needed to give you a decent framerate,
and you didn't have a giant processor, then an SSD
and some RAW mode might work.

My hard drive can only do 135MB/sec, and I might want
300MB/sec SSD or so to do that sort of thing.

Also, at some point, for artifacting, video capture may
not actually "see" it. Not every sin on the screen,
can be captured from the frame buffer. Unfortunately.

A DSLR might work, since an LCD monitor has "persistent"
pixels, and there is less possibility of a sampling rate
issue as you'd get with a short persistence CRT. There could
be flicker (I've not tried it), but it shouldn't be nearly
as bad. Note that, if you have certain "gamer" LCD screens,
they actually insert a black interval and are "flashing" the
screen with the backlight. And that may upset the DSLR.
But if you don't have any enhancements in the monitor, to
give it an artificially impressive pixel response time,
it's possible the DSLR will work fine.

*******

An example of something that might work. I was working
on a different problem. This command chops an input
movie, into 12 separate movies (for manual, parallel
processing). And at the time, I happened to experiment
with a raw format. The reason for such a wasteful format
(800GB of output files!), is the next step in the process
works better when there is no decompressing to do again.
That was just an empirical observation, having tried
with non-bgr24, and the processing rate of the next
step was severely compromised.

ffmpeg -i KEY01.mp4 -map 0 -copytb 1 -c:v rawvideo -pix_fmt bgr24 -af "volume=6dB"
-ac 2 -c:a pcm_s16le -f segment -segment_list out.list
-segment_frames 26267,52535,78803,105071,131339,157607,183875,2101 43,236411,262679,288947
G:\WORK\out%03d.mov

Now out of that mess, is

-c:v rawvideo -pix_fmt bgr24

and the output files as out00.mov, out01.mov, and each of
them is a QuickTime container movie. The RGB output (bgr24)
is about the most wasteful way to paint a pixel possible,
which requires a tremendous I/O rate. In this case,
it didn't matter, because the application shown is not
a real time one. It simply converts as fast as it
feels like, and there is no impact on quality or
responsiveness. IF you had a SATA II SSD, it might
be fast enough to eat this stuff in real time (for
a short movie).

If you feed a vcodec of rawvideo and a pix_fmt of bgr24,
contain it in a .mov container, play the output later with VLC,
you might actually get to see your movie at a decent frame rate.

Just a guess,
Paul

Jason wrote:
I submitted a bug report to Adobe regarding Audition CC 2014. The service
people asked asked me to submit screen shots to show the problem. I've
done that before, but but they were always static. Now I need to make a
couple of short (10s) movies showing the application in operation. Is
there any native capability in Win 7 to do this? (I doubt it.) If not,
what would you recommend?

TIA
Jason

Camera set to 1080.

On Tue, 02 Jun 2015 22:14:03 -0500 "Paul in Houston TX"
wrote in article
Camera set to 1080.


For sure. I'm just not sure what new artifacts will be introduces. I
guess the best thing is just to try it. Tomorrow.

On Tue, 02 Jun 2015 23:10:01 -0400 "Paul" wrote in
article
Just a guess,
Paul

Great information! Thanks - this is an adventure I hadn't planned on but
I've wondered about such capture before so this may be the chance I've
waited for to learn something... :-) I've taken a lot of courses on
lynda.com - they've obviously got this licked. Perhaps I can ask there!

On Tue, 2 Jun 2015 23:18:37 -0400 "Jason" wrote
in article

For sure. I'm just not sure what new artifacts will be introduces. I
guess the best thing is just to try it. Tomorrow.

*introduceD.

And I do have an SSD - good point.

In article ,
says...

I submitted a bug report to Adobe regarding Audition CC 2014. The service
people asked asked me to submit screen shots to show the problem. I've
done that before, but but they were always static. Now I need to make a
couple of short (10s) movies showing the application in operation. Is
there any native capability in Win 7 to do this? (I doubt it.) If not,
what would you recommend?

TIA
Jason

Hi Jason

Years ago I used wink ( http://www.debugmode.com/wink/download.htm )
There is an option to create for each mouse-click one screen-shot.
If you are finished, you can edit.
e.g.: If you was typing in a word it's enough to hold only the last
picture to show the whole word.
You can draw lines, make yellow marks, ...
Thereafter you can convert the result to a video. It doesn't take much
capacity.
Recording sound doesn't realy work. But maybe this was changed.

Regards
Reinhard

On Wed, 3 Jun 2015 11:04:04 -0400 "Jason" wrote
in article

On Tue, 2 Jun 2015 23:18:37 -0400 "Jason" wrote
in article

For sure. I'm just not sure what new artifacts will be introduces. I
guess the best thing is just to try it. Tomorrow.

*introduceD.

And I do have an SSD - good point.

I found a free program that seems to do just what I need, BB FlashBack. I
tried the free version and it did a great job capturing what I am trying
to convey to the Adobe service folks -without- introducing artifacts of
its own. The result was a pair of 20-second movies (flash or avi -
program does both) that beautifully illustrate the change in screen
behavior between older Audition versions and the latest one.

Jason wrote:
On Wed, 3 Jun 2015 11:04:04 -0400 "Jason" wrote
in article

On Tue, 2 Jun 2015 23:18:37 -0400 "Jason" wrote
in article

For sure. I'm just not sure what new artifacts will be introduces. I
guess the best thing is just to try it. Tomorrow.

*introduceD.

And I do have an SSD - good point.

I found a free program that seems to do just what I need, BB FlashBack. I
tried the free version and it did a great job capturing what I am trying
to convey to the Adobe service folks -without- introducing artifacts of
its own. The result was a pair of 20-second movies (flash or avi -
program does both) that beautifully illustrate the change in screen
behavior between older Audition versions and the latest one.

Excellent! Will have to give that a try.
Thanks for letting us know.

Paul in Houston TX wrote:
Jason wrote:
On Wed, 3 Jun 2015 11:04:04 -0400 "Jason" wrote
in article

On Tue, 2 Jun 2015 23:18:37 -0400 "Jason" wrote
in article

For sure. I'm just not sure what new artifacts will be introduces. I
guess the best thing is just to try it. Tomorrow.

*introduceD.

And I do have an SSD - good point.

I found a free program that seems to do just what I need, BB FlashBack. I
tried the free version and it did a great job capturing what I am trying
to convey to the Adobe service folks -without- introducing artifacts of
its own. The result was a pair of 20-second movies (flash or avi -
program does both) that beautifully illustrate the change in screen
behavior between older Audition versions and the latest one.

Excellent! Will have to give that a try.
Thanks for letting us know.

I see two versions listed here. The "Express" is supposed to be the free one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...sting_software

Paul

In article , says...
I see two versions listed here. The "Express" is supposed to be the free one.

That's the version I tried. It seems very solid.