9 Jan
Review: Jing Pro Screen Recording
Jing is a great free tool for screen recording, I’ve talked about it here before, it works on the PC and Mac, and you should definitely check it out if you haven’t already.
A couple of days ago they launched a new ‘Pro’ upgrade option, which costs $15 per year, and adds the ability to record mpeg movies instead of just the flash movies in the basic version.
The flash movies are fantastic for recording presentations, or mostly static screen content. And, if you’re recording that kind of thing, you might not need the upgrade, the new format will not help you in the slightest. In fact, in many cases it will increase the size of your files and reduce the fidelity.
However, if you’ve ever tried recording game footage with the flash video option, you’ll know that the frame rate isn’t great, and the file sizes are huge. The new mpeg option is much better, maybe even essential, for recording anything where there are a lot of changes on screen. You should get a better frame rate, and will get a much smaller file size. I recorded a similar video with both options, and found that the mpeg version was 1/10th of the size (6mb, compared to 60mb for flash/swf). The results will vary, but there are definite gains to be had.
Here’s a quick snippet of Sneezies footage I recorded with the new Pro recording option:-
It’s far from perfect, and for iPhone game footage recording the simulator won’t take the place of recording the footage from an actual device with Jing, but compared the old flash videos it looks like a good step forward.
So is it recommended? Well yeah, if you need to record and share animated/action screencasts on a regular basis it’s well worth $15. I’m constantly sending little movies to Craig, and this cranks them out at higher frame rates and at a fraction of the size, it’s a definite win for me.
But it’s not perfect. If you’re only recording largely static presentations (like if you have a whole second or more with the same content on screen), the new recording option will not be for you.
Also, the new option is active by default and is presented just as an improvement across the board, it’s not made clear enough that there are specific use cases for each recording method. The way the option works is also broken: there is a single global setting to choose what kind of video you want to record. If I want to record a presentation, I’ll have to go to the preferences panel and change my default setting to flash/swf, it would have been much more useful to offer two video buttons in the capture panel. Hopefully this will be an option in future versions.
The additional listed benefits of the upgrade are the removal of Jing branding from videos, one click uploading to YouTube, and improved compatibility with other video sharing sites. I haven’t played around with the built-in uploading options, but if they work as well as the Screencast.com upload feature, I’m sure they’ll be very useful. These pro features may provide some of you with enough reason to upgrade, even if you don’t need the mpeg recording.
Summary
It’s good, but it’s not for everyone and it could do with some improvement. But if you need to record active screen content, and share it quickly and easily, this is worth spending $15 on.
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