Sometimes you need to record exactly what happens on your screen, there are a number of free options for doing this.
We use Screenr and Screencastomatic.
There is a list of other tools here.
Remember you will still need to storyboard your screencast. Think about what you need open and ready to show on your desktop. It is also useful to close things like Skype and disable your notifications before pressing record.
New free tools are being created all of the time but most don’t stay free for ever. Try out the free trials and find one you like before spending any money.
We like Moovly for whiteboard animations, the free version lets you make 10-minute videos.
For a comprehensive list of alternatives check out this list.
The easiest way to annotate your video is to use the inbuilt tools on YouTube.
There are a few apps which have added functionality like being able to freehand draw onto the video but some of them may cost you a couple of Euros.
Ink 2 Go – is very good and very easy to use. You can have a 15day free trial but the license can be bought for a one off fee of €20.
For iPad, Telestrator app is nice, you can buy it from the iPad app store.
For still images Snagit is a good, free annotation tool. Annotate your picture and then insert it into your video.
For Windows users, Demohelper lets you annotate parts of your screen and may be useful for technical tutorials.
There are a couple of options for inserting still pictures into your video.
In iMovie you can upload a picture to your timeline in the same way as you would upload a video clip. The default setting is to display the picture for 4 seconds but if you click and drag the yellow border you can adjust the time.
In other versions of video editing software you may need to paste the same picture into the timeline multiple times to get it to display for longer than one frame.
Your graphics can be photographs, presentation slides (in powerpoint use “save as” to change the file type to a picture format), cartoons, scanned hand-drawn images, or a freeze frame from the video (in iMovie, “Modify > Add Freeze Frame”).