Ever watched a video that's a recording of someone demonstrating something on their PC and narrating what they're doing? There are tons of them on YouTube, and it's a terrific format for tutorials, demonstrating Web services and can even be useful in that big presentation you have with the boss tomorrow. Watching them is easy. But making your own? Seems like a tricky proposition.
The category of software that we're talking about are "screen recorders", and there's no question that The Big Kahuna of screen recording software on the PC platform is Camtasia, from TechSmith. It's terrific -- I use it myself -- but it's also expensive, at $299.
There are other solutions, including some that are web-based, but the challenge isn't to find one that works, it's to find one that's really easy to work with and does just enough of the job to accomplish your goals, not overwhelm you with options and complexity. After all, if your goal is to narrate what you're doing on screen, you don't want to learn something new, you just want a "record" button and the ability to save the output video in a format that YouTube understands.
