I’ve spoken to a few people recently who want a free / cheap PC app for recording usability tests, i.e. a screen recorder that does picture in picture. On a Mac, the solution is easy to find – it’s Silverback ($50). But on a PC, what have you got?
The most obvious contender is Morae – but it’s pretty damn expensive at $2000, and has has a whole raft of powerful research features that you might never need. It’s a bit extreme if all you want is to record footage of a user test for archiving and making highlight clips. Another downside is that Morae records to a proprietary format (.RDG) which you have to import into a sister app (Morae manager) and then batch export to get shareable video. This can take hours for big studies, and is best set up as a night-time batch job. In other words, a bit of a hassle.
One of the big questions you have to ask yourself when looking for a cheap alternative is whether you can live without picture in picture (i.e. the webcam footage of the user pulling faces as they do the tasks). It might be the industry standard nowadays, but a few years ago things were very different. Back in the 1990s it was normal to scale screen footage down to VHS resolution and record it onto tape, making the footage impossibly blurry (1024×768 down to 330×480 is never going to be legible). Later on, it became fashionable to record onto DVD-Video, which is higher resolution (720×480), but still fairly unreadable. If you wanted, you could add a hardware video mixer and a second camera to allow picture-in-picture of the user’s face. This was fairly common but not particularly useful since it didn’t escape from the fact that you could barely make out what was happening on screen.
The big breakthrough came when screen recording software appeared, allowing pixel perfect full-resolution recording along with audio via an attached microphone. Apps like Lotus Screencam and Camstudio were among the first entrants. Since then, masses of cheap screen recording apps have appeared, though not all are appropriate for user testing – some output strange video formats, others slow the test machine down or crash after 20 minutes. To save you the trouble of finding out the hard way, I’ve put together a list of personal recommendations:
No Budget whatsoever: Windows Media Encoder 9
- no picture in picture
Out of all the free screen recorders, Windows Media Encoder is the only one that includes editing facilities that allows you to create highlight clips from your sessions. The UI is pretty horrible, but it’s fit for purpose – just. (for example, the editing tool only gives you a thumbnail view of your footage, which is annoying). On the upside, footage is saved directly as WMV, so no need for time-consuming exports. Plus, the editor can trim the WMVs into highlight clips almost instantaneously.
Tiny Budget: Jing Pro with Quicktime Pro ($15+$30)
- no picture in picture
The new Jing Pro allows you to save your sessions as MPEG-4/H.264 video. This means you can then edit the video (unlike Jing basic, which though free, only outputs .SWF which isn’t editable). In addition to Jing Pro, you will need a stand alone video editing app. The cheapest option that’s capable of editing screen resolution video is Quicktime Pro ($30), which allows you to create highlight clips, and also chapter markers. The UI is limited, but unlike Windows Media Encoder, it’s easy to use. It’s also quick – it doesn’t require lengthy encoding or re-encoding of the video.
Small budget: Camtasia ($300)
- with picture in picture
We are now getting into the realms of non-cheap, but Camtasia is worth considering since it does picture in picture, unlike any of the other contenders. This is a big benefit – and it’s also still a lot cheaper than Morae ($2000). Camtasia is a mature product and it comes with a decent editing tool, along with various funky screencasting features that you probably wont need for user testing.
If you go for one of these options, you will notice that you have no functionality that allows you to add markers or flags to the timeline as it records. Don’t worry, there’s no need to get Morae or Silverback envy. In your session notes, simply record the current time when something interesting happens (You can bind a macro to a keypress if you’re feeling clever). Then, when looking at the session video afterwards, all you need to do is fast forward to the place where the system clock on the video matches the time in your notes. It aint rocket science.
Finally, I should mention I’ve omitted to talk about any of the really important aspects of user research: recruitment, study design, interview techniques, analysis methods, and so on. Your software package is only really an enabler for this “big stuff”. Luckily, these bigger issues have been written about extensively elsewhere. Mike Kuniavsky’s Observing the User Experience is good; so is Jeff Rubin and Dana Chisnell’s Handbook of Usability Testing (2nd ed). Remember, you can skimp on everything apart from hard graft and critical thinking.
Do you know of any other decent screen recording apps that do picture-in-picture with audio? I’d love to know!
Great post Harry.
I did a similar comparison this past fall for alternatives to Morae and the biggest thing I’ve found is that Morae is really overkill for most people.
Half the time you can do just fine with Camtasia doing scree/audio recording for you.
On the mac there is ScreenFlow, 99$. Which is very nice!
No PIP but free http://camstudio.org/
@Roland – screenflow is fantastic for making beautiful screencasts. But for usability testing, Silverback has some useful features, and is half the price.
@M The problem with Camstudio is that it outputs .SWF files as your video. This is not straightforward to edit. But, I guess if you don’t need to edit and you are just recording for archiving/analysis then Camstudio might do the trick. However, I don’t know if it works reliably for long sessions (e.g. 90 minutes solid) without causing performance problems.
Ditto on the screenflow – nice effects can be added within the app which is a nice touch
Just a correction to your point about Morae videos. You can create a video of a session in real time (while the study is in progress) by logging in with Observer and saving the file as a .wmv. So if you just want videos of the session you don’t need to import .rdg files into Manager at all. I’ve written an eBook with more tips like this available here.
Hi Harry, in the tiny budget category could I put out a shout for TechSmith’s Snagit, $49 (£28). Using it with a free codec like Xvid gives (ahem) usable results. No picture in picture, but it does do audio (not forgetting it’s pretty much the best screen capture tool money can buy). And for editing the results, Windows MovieMaker comes free with most recent flavours of the OS.
Thanks for the tip, Nick! So Windows Movie Maker can deal with resolutions like 1024 x 768? Upon import does it spend ages converting the video?
> Thanks for the tip, Nick!
No problem, Harry. Thanks for the informative post and blog.
> So Windows Movie Maker can deal with resolutions like 1024 x 768?
Yes.
> Upon import does it spend ages converting the video?
Snagit saves the files as AVIs. They come straight into MovieMaker. Depending on the codec you use though, Snagit might spend a bit of time procesing the file once you’ve finished.
[...] You can make the software side really easy by using Silverback (Mac only) for quick and cheap or Morae (Windows only) for comprehensive and pricier. If you’re looking for something cheaper for the PC, there are some cheap alternatives to Morae. [...]
Have you ever tryed BBFlashback?
http://www.bbsoftware.co.uk/BBFlashBackExpress/Home.aspx
http://www.bbsoftware.co.uk/BBFlashBack/Home.aspx
No, I haven’t… There are a hell of a lot of screen recorder apps out there. If you are going to try it for usability testing, I recommend seeing how well it copes when recording for 90 minutes solid. You don’t want it crashing during an actual research session.
I was just looking into this. Webcammax will do an unlimited number of picture-in-picture videos, and can record your desktop including focusing on the area around the mouse. And unlike a lot of software that does Picture in Picture webcams, it actually keeps them mostly in sync. Downsides include being a resource hog, unweildly large recordings (no compression), and max recording resolution of 640×480. It’s about 50$ a copy.
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!
[...] using your software. The best is Silverback, which is pretty slick but only for Mac. (For Windows, keep looking.) Because it’s recorded, you can skip over boring stuff and replay interesting stuff over [...]
A word on CamStudio – it does record avi if you change video recording settings. It records for fairly long periods though havent tried 90 minutes.
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.