Office Labs Community Clips - Quick, easy and free Screen & Audio Recording to WMV

PerformancePointy: Wade Dorrell - Show Your Work

"One of the great tools Microsoft Office Labs builds is "Community Clips", which makes it easy to record what happens on-screen, along with microphone-in, as a nicely-compressed WMV file.
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OfficeLabs - Project: Community Clips

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Community Clips is a portal for viewing, sharing, and discussing informal "how-to" videos (screencasts) on Microsoft Office products. It also includes a client application for easy recording of screen views and voice. [GD: Emphasis added]
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Community Clips - Download
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Install Community Clips v1.0
1. Install Community Clips v1.0
2. When installation is complete, a Community Clips icon will appear in your system tray and Office Ribbon:
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I totally missed this yesterday. I mistook the Community Clips site as a simple video sharing (i.e. Soapbox, Youtube, etc) site. Not only is it that, but they also released is a utility to help you create the videos too! And it works outside of Office.

This free utility can be used to capture a video of your screen, your audio (Mic In) and bundle it into a WMV file for uploading to the Community Clips site OR to email it OR to save it to you drive for later uploading to other sites.

The format, bit rate, etc is all hard coded into the app, probably to provide as simple a utility as possible. And simple to use it is.

Windows - Alt - R to start recording (or clicking on the icon in the system tray and selecting Start Recording) and away you go. To pause or stop you click on the system tray icon again. At that point you get a preview window to view your recorded video. From there you can save it, email it, upload it, File 13 it (delete it), etc.

And here's a quick and dirty screencast done with it (I think this is my first screencast on my blog... :).




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