How to record your screen with no lag

By: Adward Chan
Submitted: 2009-10-27 14:31:11
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Screencast is a new digital way to record your computer screen with software. It gets popular online worldwide since it creates a face-to-face communication, or a hand-by-hand solution to demonstrate and share knowledge with people. It’s widely used as tutorial maker and presentation tool in education, e-learning and commercial fields. However, the screencast asks for higher computer hardware requirements as the rapid increase of video quality, like more visual effect and synchronous narration. Many people find lag when recording, making their videos blunt and ambiguous. In fact, under the majority of cases, the video lag can be effectively moderated and solved. Here are some useful tips on how to record your screen with no lag. Have a try before your next screencast.

Close all unnecessary applications before recording

The whole process of screencast requires plenty system resources to run smoothly. The extra loading time and redundant responding time will appear if there’re too many processes which do no benefits to your screencast working at the same time, slowing down your video and making it unwatchable. This is the first thing you should do, check your system task manager and find out if there’s any extra program might do harm to your screencast, end them at once.

Set right resolution for your computer screen

The higher screen resolution you choose the more memory space it costs. Since the working principle of screen recorder is to record what happens on your desktop, it captures any changes of every pixel on your computer screen. When you record screencast under a larger resolution, more pixel information will be recorded, indicating more memory rooms are occupied. In that case, lag always happens if your whole screen alters rapidly (because of the frequent data exchange), so adjust your screen resolution to a lower but acceptable level to reduce the consumption of pixel information. Generally, 800*600 is enough for most of demo tutorial videos. Another way is to customize your recording area. Now most of screen recording software allow you to customize your recording area, so you can create your screencast by recording just a part of your screen.

Simplify the display color quality

Do you like to set your desktop in higher color display? And is it necessary while screencasting? It’s hard to distinguish between the 16bit and 32bit color by human’s eyes, but it is rather a big difference for computer. Why not set your screen in lower color quality and save rooms for your screencast resource? Right click on your desktop and choose “Properties”, then change your color quality from 32bit to 16 bit in setting page. Furthermore, if it is possible, change your screen refresh rate is also a great way to reduce the system resource consumption. It’s commonly used in screencast which contains more simple frozen pictures than movies. You can set it at 60 Hertz, that’s enough for screencast as well as no harm to your eyes while recording.

Lower your recording frame rate

The frame rate describes how frequent the program capture image for your screencast in every second. For desktop demo and tutorial, 10~15 frame is enough to make your video clear and smooth. If you’re preparing to make a gameplay or movie recording, you have to set it higher. It’s quite confusing for a beginner to adjust the frame rate perfectly to adapt to what he records. Once you meet this tough job and don’t know how to do, try some simple programs with lazy settings. There’re two popular recording modes: the screen shots and full motion recording. The former takes every shot according to your mouse click and keystrokes, and the latter records all your movement as a video, so you don’t need to bother with the setting. Just choose the recording mode and check whether it work well with no lag.

Optimize the audio input

The audio of screencast is also a key section of system resource consumption, since you have to import your voice through microphones which will take up some system memory to keep it works properly. The best way, as you consider that the audio is not a must-have and can be omitted, is to disable the sound while screencasting. You will find much more efficient recording progress with fluency. Certainly, if you want to keep the sound, voice and even music in your video, try post synchronization instead of synchronous narration. Take DemoCreator as example, you can use Audio Editor to add narration for your screencast, or directly import an audio file into it. It really eases the burden of OS, making the screencast fluently.

Combine all short clips into an integrated video

This would be the last but most complicated way so you can jump over this part unless that your computer can’t afford to create a good screencast. Make full use of pause function during the recording, save your screencast every minute as a small video clip. After all parts are done, open all project files and combine them together. Originally the combination is used as an advanced video editing feature, and now it can also solve the lag problem for the computers.

Summary

Well, that’s all the tips you can make your screencast easy and smooth. There’s one thing have to mention that more and more powerful screencast software with fantastic features are coming out. In order to make full use of them, the best way is to choose the program wisely, and don’t forget to speak up your requirement to the developer. Our aim is, to record your screen with no lag.

Article source: Expert Articles