Screen Capture Formats

Almost all screencasting programs support saving and exporting to multiple formats, so depending on your needs, you can choose which format to use. Out of the most popular programs, only one (Macromedia Captivate) is an exception, because the support for exporting to external movie formats has been removed after it has been acquired by Macromedia and later by Adobe. Flash might be a nice and a wide-spread format but there are cases when one needs other formats as well.

Choosing between output file formats is based mainly on your personal preferences and on your needs. If you want to integrate the presentation in a Web page on your site, than Flash might be best (although most browsers support other formats as well). But if you need it as a standalone presentation, then an executable file might be OK (just be careful if you mail it because many e-mail scanners automatically remove attached executable files because viruses often come in exes). Movie formats are also OK, unless you need to play the demo on Linux, where the Microsoft movie formats (.avi for example) are not welcome. A concise, yet comprehensive comparison of screencasting file formats can be found in the documentation of Camtasia Studio (the “Help Me Choose a File Format” topic)

Another technological issue to consider is the size of the output file. In this case the bigger is not the better (especially if the demo will be hosted on the Web). It is true that sometimes you will choose poorer quality but a smaller size but it is a different story when the quality is not excellent and in addition to that the output file is enormous.