Screen Capture Utility

Screen Capture Utility was designed to be a small tool that can run in timed mode or in manual mode. When run in timed mode, captures will be automatically recorded at the frequency defined by the user. In manual mode, the captures can be made by using a hot key (Ctrl-f) or by clicking the button on the utility's main dialog.

The hot key can be turned on or off independently of whether the timer is enabled. After installing the utility on the presenter's system, run it and click configure.

Set the timer, capture period, capture path, image size, and hot key as desired. Note that if you turn the timer on, it will begin recording as soon as you click OK. The capture recording process is fairly resource intensive. You'll want to tune the capture frequency and size such that you can get the duration you want without filling all available free disk space with captures.

You'll also need to be careful that the capture process doesn't render the computer so unresponsive that it will be difficult for the presenter to use. At the time of this writing, the bottleneck on today's well equipped computer seems to be disk write speed. With a capture size of 640x480 or greater, it's difficult to capture more than two or three frames per second. This makes the tool inappropriate for capture of rapidly moving animations.

To get images with full detail, set the presenter computer's screen resolution to match the capture size. If the images will be scaled to a smaller size later, be sure to verify that fonts the presenter will use for critical text will still be legible at the smaller size. Plan your disk space, accounting for approximately 900KB per 640x480 capture and 1400KB per 800x600 capture.

Captures will be written to a directory whose name begins with "SCREENCAP". It's important that you don't rename the directory or the capture files because the information encoded in those names will be used in the post-production process.