whats best for software demo videos

I have been making videos to demo my software apps with stuff like Altarsoft Video Capture, oRipa Screen recorder etc.

Trouble is after I get the video of the screen there seems no way to annotate it.

(I've seen these nice videos where someone has "written on the video" with text in callouts, or scribbled arrows pointing to key features etc.. But don't know how its done)

I've tried dozens of video editors (most are good for cutting,splitting, joining videos etc or adding effects like brightening, rotating etc) But none seem to allow you to "annotate" onto the video. Years ago I used virtual dub but captioning is not the same as callouts (besides vdub usually made the videos 100 times as large).

So is this an impossible idea? Jahshaka has something like this but it seems to allow you to only draw frame by frame (lord have mercy) ...that is when I can even get it to display a complete frame.

Or am I going about it the wrong way? Do I have to give up the approach of video recording first and annotating after and instead go to something like CamStudio where I annotate "as I record" rather than after recording?

What have other people done to get those nice video demos? (Or is there nothing freeware,open source at all?)

 

Thanks for the tip David. I've been doing by video stuff in XP where windows movie maker is lame. Never thought of moving it over to vista or windows 7 movie maker (I have vista running in virtual box so it will be easy to copy the movies over and see how the captions work in the newer moviemaker) ...or I suppose I could just to it all in linux running under virtualbox since there seem to be loads of linux video editors to try.

 

Try the free version of Debut Video Capture Software. I think the free version will let you ad annotations and text to the video you create.

http://www.nchsoftware.com/capture/index.html

This one called Wink will work for you as well.

http://www.debugmode.com/wink/

 

If the above suggestions don't work, Sony's Vegas Platinum uses layers much like Adobe Photoshop does for pictures, and you can add a transparent layer (containing the text you want) to the main video layer, and when rendered you'll have the text on there. You can actually do TONS of things with Vegas, only con is it's not free.

 

My preference is Adobe Premiere, since it does everything I want. But if you're working with AVI files and want freeware, rock solid VirtualDub with its myriad of plugins is hard to beat. The one thing that a lot of folks overlook when making a clip--demo or otherwise--is the importance of minding the I-frame: ignorant encoders start and end their clips randomly. As a result, the audio and video often drift out of sync. If you want to include a foreign market, the freeware Aegisub is a delightfully powerful tool that lets you use raw audio wave (from the video in preview) to quickly and accurately insert subtitles, which you may include as an option in your package.

 

Thank use for the input about WindowsMovieMaker and Debut but closed-captions is not what I had in mind. (Only advantage of Debut over WMovieMaker seems to be that it allows one to display the captions at top, bottom, center instead of just at bottom of screen.)

Maybe it wasn't clear that I was not referring to using closed-captioning but to demos where one sees callouts (balloon type areas as in cartoons with text explaining what is being seen in a certain area of the screen or what should be done next etc). Nor does closed captioning allow one to draw arrows etc on the screen.

The only way I've been able to do that is to put in a second track and load jpg or bmp files into the track. At least it looks something like callouts ,rather than closed-captions, over the video but I've done it with a few apps like Wax (didn't know you could also do it with DebugMode's other app Wink so will have to look into it more carefully). With Wax the problem was I couldn't find a way to place the jpg images wherever I wanted them to overlay the video track (it was a lot of trial and error since no wysiwyg . As for good old Virtual Dub I thought it was also limited to closed-captioning ( as text only taking the whole width of the screen) and not to overlaying of jpg or bmp images onto a video. Also I tried ABC VideoRoll but couldn't get the track of jpg images to show onto the main track.

Suppose I'll just have to go back to CamStudio and put stuff in As-I-record rather than overlay it afterwards. Another way I can put stuff in As-I-record is with PicPick (the absolute best still-image screen-capture app ever made) and use their Whiteboard feature to draw stuff on the screen and then record it. But I was just hoping somebody knew a freeware that allows annotating after-recording onto already captured video. If not well I'll have to stumble around some more.

 

OK so I tried Wink. thanks a lot for pointing me to it.

First off noticed Wink has no place to open a video...so it's not a program for adding text callouts etc into an already existing video as with Wax.

Seems you can only work on videos captured with Wink itself.(Sort of like CamStudio)

I tried Wink's TimedCapture with 29 fps (seemed reasonable as its like ntsc video rate, big mistake, too many frames.) Then added a textbox callout and noticed that the app can actually resize and reposition the text box anywhere in the video frame. Makes WinMovieMaker and Debut look childish. Also it has a large number of callout types from "thinking" bubbles to arrows and beaks. Nice.

But unfortunnately at 29 fps if you want the callout displayed for 10 seconds (that is 290 frames) then after you make the text callout you have to select and copy the callout then select the 290 frames and paste it in to them. Inconvenient.

At least with Wax I can specify how long to display a jpg for ... though Wink has a sort of reverse procedure...just put callout in 1 frame and go to the edit box for "Stay in this frame for" and type in 10 sec) It works fine if you don't need the video playing while the callout is displayed.

But Wink is a great free app. Wink.Wink. http://forums.majorgeeks.com/images/smilies/wink.gif Thanks again.