Tegrity Troubles

After struggling with Tegrity, I’ve decided to switch to Jing for screen capture. Tegrity has had way too many problems.  I’ve had lots of students complain about it.  I’ve switched to using a laptop exclusively and spent two hours yesterday trying to install Tegrity on my laptop (Windows XP)  and record a ten-minute talk for my students. Here are the problems I encountered:

• The Tegrity recorder would not install unless I used Internet Explorer (you can’t just go to Tegrity’s web site and download the recorder; you have to start a recording online)
• The installation required two restarts
• I had to start the recording several times to get around IE’s security settings
• When recording using IE, I could not switch between PowerPoint and a PDF that I wanted to show my students
• In order to record and switch screens I had to use FireFox
• I could not log in using the record function from the Tegrity icon in the system tray

After all those hurdles, I finally recorded my ten-minute video.  I trimmed the first ten seconds of dead air from the front of the video using the Edit screen.  After I went back to the video, I found that ten seconds of video had been removed, but twelve seconds of audio had been removed, making the entire audio track out of sync.

Maybe that was just a server hiccup, but after a few choice words, I decided then an there to ditch Tegrity entirely and find something else.

Jing!

Jing is easy! After you download the client and set up an account,  it lives in a glowing semicircle at the top of the screen, and you just click on it and record a quick video with narration. I’ll do it now.

I recorded a video of me typing this sentence. It took two seconds to start the recording, and as soon as I stop it, it’s available on the screencast.com server in under a minute and you can paste in a link, like this:

http://screencast.com/t/qs9fahg8ZtJ

Jing is nowhere near as robust as Tegrity, but for recording quick videos, which is what I want for my online courses, it is perfect.  I downloaded the software, learned how to use it, and posted my first screencasts in under thirty minutes.

The free version sticks a Jing banner at the beginning and does not record directly from the webcam.  The pro version is only $14.95 a year and adds some features.  You can upload directly to YouTube and record video from the web cam.

Both versions have some limitations.  You can only record up to 5 minutes at a time.  For longer videos, you have to go with Camtasia Studio, which is at the other end of the spectrum in terms of price and features.  Also, with both versions you get a free screencast.com account, but you are limited to 2GB of storage and 2GB of monthly bandwidth.

With the free version though, you can save the videos as .swf files to your computer.  I tried uploading that to YouTube, but it didn’t work.  I did load it into our LMS, and the videos play just fine.  And it is so easy,  you can record a longer video in parts and post the parts.  So, for recording short screencast videos quickly, I think Jing is about perfect!