Like Peter, I don’t use the reporting that much, other than as a decent way to organize and pivot my notes for qualitative analysis. But the ability to tag highlight clip start/stop points on the fly–during the session–is worth the cost in my time alone. Otherwise, running through 20 hours of footage and processing the results might take 10 hours. Automating that work is a huge plus. And no proprietary formats.

That said I must admit that Camstudio may not be as perfect as I thought. The program has made my pc crash twice now, so maybe it only works for tests shorter than 10 minutes – which is pretty close to useless…”

I have been working as a UX professional for 12 years and have always been using Morae, but now as a one man company I need something slightly more affordable, and Camstudio seems to work for me.

After recording the avi file I import the file to Windows Movie Maker (also free) where I can edit and export the files.

It basically gives me the same features that I was using 99% of the time in Morae.

Thanks!

It’s really incredible that Techsmith is the only one that has developed such a program. We use Morae3 in our Usability Lab – but only because there isn’t an alternative.

It makes pretty large files but you can always batch compress afterwards – Any Video Converter does a great job. You can record the whole screen and also record good quality audio (44hz stereo if wanted). Overall Ive found this very good.

http://webcammax.com/

Ultimately since we’re not a PC house anyway, we went with superwebcam to join two webcam streams into one Picture-in-picture, then recording that with good old Windows Movie Maker. Superwebcam is free, (which means usable on any computer in the company!), tiny, and takes surprisingly few resources compared to other software. Huge drawback: max resolution of 320 x 240 when recorded with something else, or recording of 640×480 without sound. But overall it has produced quite adequate results without too much effort after this past batch of 20 1-hour sessions. We’re pointing a second camera at a monitor for our Picture-in-picture, but again, that’s because we’re not a PC house.

http://www.superwebcam.com

Neither work particularly amazingly, but both at least are useful in different circumstances. If you find other solid alternatives, please keep us posted!

http://www.bbsoftware.co.uk/BBFlashBackExpress/Home.aspx

http://www.bbsoftware.co.uk/BBFlashBack/Home.aspx

No problem, Harry. Thanks for the informative post and blog.

> So Windows Movie Maker can deal with resolutions like 1024 x 768?

Yes.

> Upon import does it spend ages converting the video?

Snagit saves the files as AVIs. They come straight into MovieMaker. Depending on the codec you use though, Snagit might spend a bit of time procesing the file once you’ve finished.