Expression Encoder Screen Capture 3 – HD screencast demonstration

image You’ve seen me do literally hundreds of Camtasia captured screencast demos.  One of the screencasts I did on Windows Server 2008 was captured using the Windows Media Encoder x64 product.  That product has now been depricated and the screencast below was captured with a new product called  Expression Encoder Screen Capture 3.  This product ships with and is designed to run with Expression Encoder 3.

This new screen capturing tool does a great job of capturing high quality work you might like to demonstrate via a blog or webpage.  The screencast below was captured where the source machine was running a display resolution of 1920x1200.  In the demo I also execute and run a Halo 3 720p HD video.  That Halo 3 video is 30fps and the data rate for the video is right at 6MB.  Try duplicating this capture with other products on the market or the internet.  Let me know how successful you were.  Grin.

The following demo requires the released version of Silverlight 3.  Install from https://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/get-started/install/default.aspx.  I haven’t quite figured out the code to force that check in the blog post.  So for now, there’s a little manual human intervention required.  You can handle it.  Smiles.

The Demo

Download Location

If you want to download the Windows Media Video file that was produced by Expression Encoder 3, right mouse click the following link and SAVE TARGET AS to a location local to your machine.

https://msinetpub.vo.llnwd.net/d1/keithcombs/screencasts/ee3/CaptureDemo/EncoderCapture.wmv

Some Notes on the Source and Output

The captured file size ended up being slightly less than 800MB.  After selecting the Expression Encoder 3 VC-1 Screen profile and making some slight adjustments, I encoded to the Silverlight VC-1 format with a resulting file size of 40.5MB.  That’s some serious crunching and compression folks.

The most impressive aspect is the quality of output.  To truly appreciate this, run this screencast on a 24” monitor that has a native res of 1920x1200 and go full screen with the Silverlight 3 player control.  The full screen button shows up if you move your mouse into the lower portion of the player and the controls pop up.  The button I am referring to is bottom right.  When full screen on a 24” monitor, the clarity should be nearly perfect with very little blurriness, artifacting, or other noise.

If you are using a smaller LCD panel like I am at the moment (15.4” laptop LCD at 1680x1050), you will see some blurriness but it should not be too bad.  I haven’t yet decided what ot use in the future for my recordings so feedback now would be VERY welcome.

Since the data rate for this screencast is 4MB, those of you with slower internet connection may see some issues with playback buffering before the file is progressively downloaded.  I am not using the adaptive bitrate streaming for this example.

Software locations

Be sure to install the released version of Silverlight 3 at https://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/get-started/install/default.aspx.  After that, be sure to download the trial versions of the Expression Suite 3 products at https://www.microsoft.com/expression/try-it/#PageTop when they come out (soon).  Expression Blend 3 with Sketchflow is available now.

Other References