Monday, November 18, 2013

Review: Snagit - Screen Capture Application - My First 10 minutes

While trying to take screenshots of the search results of HealthCare.gov site, I could take taken a screenshot of the drop down results. Each time I tried, the drop down result would disappear because I clicked out of it. I tried using the Windows Snipping Tool which I found rather useful for normal screenshot uses.

After trying again a few more times, I recalled using SnagIt with a previous company that was easy to use for this type of screenshots. Unfortunately, this is a new version and I am a little too poor (at the moment) to pay for the full version, so I used the trial version (full version is $50 pre-tax). Easy to download and install. The interface has changed a little since the last time I used it (about 4 years ago).

At first, I was excited because it worked just as I remember although the screen flickered for a moment. I did this by hitting the Print Scrn button. It immediately brings up the capture tool with the drop down still on-screen for capture. I noticed the results were not the same, so I tried it again on the home page.

This time it did not work... very odd. I went back to the other page and tried again, and did not work. No matter what I tried with mouse clicking or keyboard shortcuts, I could not get the results that I got the very first time I tried.

Fortunately, Snagit also has a feature to video capture the screen. I quickly enabled video capture and recorded 2-3 seconds of me entering in the search until I saw the drop-down then ended the video capture. This quickly brought up the snagit tool with the video. At this point it did take me a while to figure out a way to take an image of the video. It was actually in a simple location (right next to the video console with the play, rewind, forward button)... the Capture Frame button.

So I figured all that in about 10 minutes so the interface was relatively easy to use, although I was already somewhat familiar with the product. I saw some familiar features like quick editing of captured images which I completely missed when using Microsoft's Snipping Tool and the very basic Print Scrn feature. Perhaps I should focus on more screen capturing posts and videos for the remainder of the trial version :P

I totally recommend this product for screen capture if you can afford it. There a bunch of other features that I haven't looked at yet either, but I liked all the features from its older version that I couldn't find elsewhere (not that I tried really hard to find other screen capture solutions).

Reference:
http://www.techsmith.com/snagit.html
http://download.cnet.com/Snagit/3000-2192_4-10004813.html

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