If you are a budding screencaster, then there are a number of tools which can help you in your quest.

Some are free, some cost money, some are quite complicated to use, and some are simple.

Today, we’ll be looking at one of the best free and easy alternatives out there.

The Jing Project, TechSmith’s free-to-download, cross platform screen capture and screencasting tool, has just received some welcome upgrades that make it even easier for anyone to get started in the world of screen recording. 

Useful Functionality Added

I reviewed Jing when it first reared its head back in July, and since then the Techsmith team have added some useful functionality to this already useful tool.

If you haven’t encountered it before, Jing Project lets you make screen capture still images of your desktop (or anything on it), or movies of up to five minutes long of the same. 

This can be really useful if you are trying to show a friend how to do something on your computer, or need to get a point across quickly to a client without laboriously putting it into words and pulling out your hair.

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Camtasia Studio is an excellent starting point for any would be screencasters, and for many people an excellent endpoint too.

Out of all of the tools available to an enthusiastic and willing  screencaster, Camtasia Studio covers all the basics and makes it easy for beginners.

Professional screencasting is still, at the moment, a relatively small field, and you can probably count the number of people making a living from screencasts on one hand. Or maybe a couple at most.

Whether for putting together video software demonstrations, learning materials or information products, Camtasia Studio can come in very handy.

Camtasia Studio 5 Popularizing The Format

The soon to be released Camtasia Studio 5 is likely to continue in popularizing the format, just as Techsmith’s Jing Project seems to have made an impact in the blogosphere. 

What the Jing Project has done for newcomers to screencasting, Camtasia does for those looking to put together a more professional screencast, packing in an impressive feature set.

The latest version has some excellent features, and while they won’t be convincing me to leave my Final Cut Pro and iShowU workflow, I think that I will probably be tempted into checking what’s on offer.

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Wordpress has slowly but surely become the standard blogging platform on the Internet, with seemingly everyone and their mother being able to use the simple and intuitive interface.

Video bloggers haven’t been ignored either, as Wordpress has quite a few solutions for that style of posting if you are willing to dig around a bit.

Revver’s recent foray into WP plugins covers pretty much everything you might need to get started. The latest instalment of the Tubetorial 7 Must Have Killer Plugins For Wordpress series covers getting this installed and what it can do for you.

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Avot mV is a new free application which allows users anywhere to watch their favourite clips from a whole host of video sharing websites.

The program works on a host of cell phones and PDAs, and is currently in Beta public testing.

You can either download the small program (currently Version 1.2) or point your mobile browsers at the Avot Mobile Site.

Then the whole range of online videos becomes available to you on the move, whether they be on hosting sites such as YouTube and Dailymotion, or embedded on other websites and blogs.

The simple brilliance of the application doesn’t end there though, as well as being able to watch videos, you can organize them into playlists, as well as topics like sports and music, essentially making your mobile device of choice a kind of video jukebox for all occasions.

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Kaltura is a new video editing tool which aims to bring video editing out of the solitary endeavor that it has been for a while now and take it in to the realms of social networking.

Online video editing capabilities are slowly but surely continuing to improve, with new programs and free tools available for most types of editing you’ll ever need to produce a good online video.

Because of this, it is now relatively simple to remix your clips online. Kaltura marks itself out from the rest of the web video editing market by attempting to turn it in to a social activity, and doing a good job of it.

Ever since the release of JumpCut and Eyespot last year it has been possible to upload your video clips and edit them right from your browser. Since then other players have joined the web video editing game - including the peoples’ favourite YouTube with its Remixer tool.

Certainly Jumpcut and Eyespot have run their fair share of promotions whereby users can remix commercial footage. But until now there hasn’t been a tool that places community and social editing as its core focus.

Kaltura aims to fill that gap, supplying an award winning service centered around groups building and collaborating on community driven video projects. 

If you have thought about using video to expand your blog community, to market your business through interactivity, or to promote your organization or group, Kaltura might just be worth checking in on.

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FixMyMovie is a new free web-based service which allows you to easily improve the quality of your video clips which was launched on September 24th at the DEMOfall 07 conference.

It works by simply analyzing your clip and making automatic adjustments to it. All you have to do is upload your video clips and FixMyMovie does the rest for you.

It is based on the MotionDSP video enhancement technology, and the service can significantly improve the quality, focus, sharpness and stability of your camcorder or mobile phone video footage.

Here are more details:

Overview

“Fixmymovie.com can take any video file from a mobile phone or digital camera and make it better. FixMyMovie’s suite of automatic enhancements improves overall resolution, corrects for poor lighting conditions and removes the blockiness and other artifacts that ruin most mobile phone and low-end digital camera videos.“

MotionDSP’s patent-pending technology studies your video and finds the unique information present in each frame of video. If it can match the scene (background) or objects (foreground) in more than 3-4 frames, it puts that information together to make a cleaner video.

MotionDSP seems also to be using technical approaches similar to what you would call ” interpolation” and “sharpening”, if you were optimizing a still digital image. 

Applied to the a low-quality recorded video they all contribute to make the video image look less pixelated and with more and better defined contours.

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Acrobat Connect Professional is a web conferencing and online collaboration tool from Adobe.

It keeps improving with every release and remains the real time conferencing solution to beat.

I thought I’d take another look at the technology to what has changed since I last reviewed it. 

So read on for a comprehensive, independent evaluation of some of the key features of Connect Professional, along with some strengths and weaknesses of what was formerly known as Macromedia Breeze.

Changes Under The Hood

Not much has apparently changed on the surface of Connect Professional since my last review of it in December 2006, has key changes and improvements have mostly taken place under the hood, providing what was formerly known as Breeze with the extra capabilities and performance it needed to stand on a par with its increasingly numerous competitors.

Acrobat Connect Professional is a fully featured, high-quality web conferencing technology which brings together the best facilities and tools to web conference, collaborate in real/time and deliver live web presentations. 

In all of these areas Connect Professional provides excellent tools, performance and reliability, while adding a level of interface and tools customization that is yet unmatched by the industry.

Elegance, efficiency, performance are the first adjectives that come to mind if I make an effort to synthesize my sensations relative to Connect Pro. If I had to use automotive industry terms to make a description I would say that Connect Pro feels like a BMW with some of Jaguar-like fine touches.

Here are more details:

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