Screen Toaster allows you to capture the screen on your computer, or you can capture the input from a web camera and upload it online. These are the videos that you’ll often see online used to capture walk-through tutorials, PowerPoint presentation videos and more. These videos are highly prized because they combine audio with video to be able to communicate with thousands of people online as if they were all in the same room with you. Other benefits include the fact that video and audio is much more personal experience than someone would have if they simply read the same information out of an ebook. Your viewers get to hear your voice and get a feel for who you are and the passion that you bring to your topic. This can help you to increase your sales and also the price of your info products if you’re using screen capture videos of just text.

What’s nice about Screen Toaster is that you don’t have to worry about downloading any software onto your computer, you just setup your account and can then login from anywhere you like with an internet connection. You have the option of choosing the whole screen or custom-sizing a rectangle on your screen for the exact area that you want to record for your presentation. Other features include the ability to download the file to your hard drive, the ability to upload to Youtube, to upload to the Screen Toaster website and the ability to download as an swf  or as a mov file. You can record the audio from the video, remove the audio or web cam from the video, add captions plus change the thumbnail for your video.

Using Screen Toaster

The features are nice to be sure, considering that this screencasting software is free. There are no time limits involved either, so you can go right ahead and record a one hour presentation if you like. If you learn how to use the shortcut (alt s to start and stop recording) you can create a decent over the shoulder video capture without having to do a lot of editing, just pause the recording when you switch between windows or take a minute to login to a site. While all of this sounds great, you’ll soon learn that you also get what you pay for with this software. So far, I’ve used Screen Toaster at least 10 times, and my initial attempts were pretty dismal. You have to make sure that each time you start a recording you specify that you want to record audio – it sounds like a no-brainer, but there are times (say after your second or third retake) that you have to resize your screen capture rectangle (unless you want the entire full screen to be captured) and you forget to enable the audio. It can be frustrating when you realize that your 20 minute presentation didn’t consist of any audio!

While it’s nice to have this software load online, for my older and under powered computer running Windows XP I found that I would get errors while recording and lose the entire session as a result. There was no way to know until you were finished – so once again, if you like to ramble for 40 minutes at a time – you may be annoyed at the very end to see the recording had an error.

Lastly, the other troubles you’ll likely encounter is if you attempt to upload or download your file to anywhere but the actual Screen Toaster site. I haven’t managed to successfully upload to Youtube yet, and if you do so before uploading to the Screen Toaster site, you’ll end up losing the entire file. My advice – just upload to the Screen Toaster site, it’s not worth the risk.

Screen Toaster offers free high quality video hosting, so you don’t have to worry about finding a place to host. From there it’s a simple process to copy some embed code to get the video onto your blog. While it is a far from perfect video solution, it’s worked for me a lot better than the free version of Cam Studio that I’ve tried (never seemed to record audio right, no matter what I did). It’s a good piece of software for those that are looking to go beyond having text and into having some more rich content on their website while potentially creating a closer bond to their followers.

Check out Screen Toaster and see what you think.