Screenr + YouTube = Free Callout Editing
March 17th, 2011 by Greg R Notess
Since the demise of ScreenToaster (and I can’t even get to their site today) and my expectations that ScreenJelly may not last long, I’ve been looking for a new favorite among the free, online screencasting tools. Screencast-O-Matic has greatly improved since I last looked at it, and the editing options with the oh-so-affordable $9/year Pro account, make it even more compelling. I’ll have a more in-depth review of Screencast-O-Matic and its newer features later. However, today, I was impressed while playing around with Screenr. I used to consider Screenr primarily as a tool for Twitter users. But what I realized today is you can use Screenr to record a screencast (up to five minutes) and then upload to YouTube where you can use the Annotations function to add call outs. It is not full editing, but it does give the ability to create text bubbles and notes over the video, and that is one of my favorite editing capabilities.
Here’s the screencast, embedded. I’ll have to create another one to show how to do this. If you don’t want to listen to the whole thing, the call out annotation is at 1:58.
Or go direct to it on YouTube.
Hey Greg, I didn’t see the callout – am I blind, or does it only show for the author or something?
I can see it (note that it is all the way at 1:58 towards the end of the video) from different browsers and on other computers when I’m not logged in. So it seems to me to be showing, but maybe not in Canada? I’ll have to add a few more obvious ones near the beginning and do some further testing.
Interesting – on my Mac I have a plugin that converts the YouTube video to H.264, and the callout’s not there. When I view on a Windows machine in native Flash, there it is. I guess that’s a minor limitation to be aware of.