Demo Builder 5 is one of the easiest screencast programs to get up and running. You just load the program, select a screen area, click a button and start recording. When you’ve finished, you click an icon in the Windows toolbar to stop the recording and load it up into the Demo Builder movie editor. You can now press a key to run your movie and check that all is well.

If you’ve used other screencast programs such as Camtasia or BB Flashback, you will immediately notice some significant differences in the way that Demo Builder records a movie. Whereas many other screencast tools try to record absolutely everything you do - including every single cursor movement - Demo Builder records only a limited number of events such as key presses and mouse clicks. Mouse movements are interpolated between mouse-click events.

Before you start recording you may choose to record the entire screen, a selected window or, as here, a specific screen area which is marked off by an orange rectangle.

This approach has pros and cons. On the plus side, you don’t have to worry about every little mistake you make being permanently recorded into the movie. As mouse movements are simulated by the software, the end result is that every movie looks smooth and professional - many of the usual mistakes due to incorrect or uncertain mouse movements are ‘ironed out’. On the minus side, if you really do want to record every single movement - maybe to help someone debug a software problem or to record from a mouse intensive program such as Windows Paint or Macromedia Fireworks - then Demo Builder is not the ideal tool for the job.

For example, if you record a drawing in Paint, Demo Builder takes a screenshot when you press the mouse button and another when you release it. If you happen to have drawn a picture of the Mono Lisa between those two clicks, the entire picture will appear instantly when the movie is played back since the actual mouse movements you used to create the illustration won’t have been recorded. There is an option to capture additional screenshots ‘manually’ by pressing a hotkey (F1 by default) but this still won’t achieve the kind of complete recording possible with Camtasia or BB Flashback.

Demo Builder provides a number of features to make the recording process simple. Before starting a new recording you can select the recording area. This may be the entire screen, a portion of the screen contained within a sizeable rectangle or a specific named window. The available windows can be selected from a drop down menu. There is one problem you may encounter, however. In some cases, when you have multiple windows onscreen, you may choose to record one window but when the recording commences, the selected window becomes hidden behind some other window. For example, I selected a Microsoft Word window which happened to be in the foreground while my web browser was in the background. But when I clicked the Demo Builder ‘record’ button, suddenly the web browser was brought into the foreground with a Word-sized area selected for recording. To record a specific window, therefore, you need to arrange your screen with some care beforehand.

Demo Builder 5 even has a simple audio editor which lets you cut and trim tracks, adjust the volume and add basic effects such as fade-in and fade-out.

Optionally you can record a narration during the recording process and you may also have the software automatically insert ‘call-outs’ (like coloured boxes or ‘speech bubbles’) to annotate your actions as you go along. So, for example, a bubble will contain the text ‘Click the MyWindow title bar’ if that’s what you did at that point in the recording. Once you have finished recording, you can change the text of the annotations in the editing environment. You can also add or delete annotations, move them to different screen locations and alter their visual style such as background colour, font and alignment. If you want to make an interactive demo or tutorial, you can also add buttons and text entry fields so that users can progress through your recording by clicking buttons or answering questions (moving on or jumping to a specific frame when they enter the correct answer).

The Demo Builder movie editor displays a thumbnail of each screenshot. Notice that you can work with multiple recordings, each of which is shown as one branch on the tree on the left-hand side. You can view individual frames at full size. Here I have added an annotation and a button. Each object, including the moving mouse pointer, has its own adjustable timeline shown at the screen bottom.

All the annotation and interactivity options are added within the editing environment. This displays your recording in the form a sequence of ‘frames’ - that is, the individual screenshots that are recorded when some significant event, such as a mouse click, occurs. A timeline at the bottom of the screen lets you move objects to enable you to select the precise moment at which a buttons or annotation will appear when the movie is played. You can add an audio track in the editor as an alternative to recording audio simultaneously with the screen captures.

One advantage of recording screenshots only when a significant event occurs is that the size of the resulting Flash file may be significantly smaller than an equivalent file generated by a program which makes a ‘continuous’ recording of the screen. As a test, I recorded The Windows Explorer with both BB Flashback and Demo Builder. In each recording all I did was click ‘My Computer’ ten times to expand and contract its subfolders. The BB Flashback Flash file was 532K in size. The Demo Builder file was just 200K. This is hardly surprising since BB Flashback recorded 218 frames whereas Demo Builder only recorded 11 frames - one at the start of the recording and one more for each mouse click.

Now, while it would be possible to tweak the BB Flashback recording by reducing the frame rate and setting various other options to optimise file size, it is easier to create small Flash files with Demo Builder for the simple reason that this is what it does by default. Bear in mind, however, that it also loses any screen animation (e.g. the movement due to the ‘expansion’ and ‘contraction’ of the Explorer subfolders). In the present case that is not a major drawback (after all, who really wants to see folders expanding, anyway!) but in other cases (if you want to make a truly accurate recording of the screen) it might be.

For added impact you can insert animated text or some ready-to-use animated graphics such as pulsing rectangles, arrows and hands.

Usefully, there is a spelling checker so you can check your annotations as you go along. The speller can switch between US and UK English as well as Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian and Spanish. A Localization tool lets you export all text and annotations into a single Word file, edit them to another language and then re-import the whole set of translated annotations in one step.

I have to admit that I was prejudiced against Demo Builder when I began this review. After all, why would anyone want to record an animated sequence of screenshots which would miss out many important mouse events when you could just as easily make a more complete recording with Camtasia or BB Flashback?

Once I started to use it in earnest, however, I noticed some important arguments in favour of the Demo Builder way of working. First, by interpolating smooth mouse movements between a limited number of key frames, you can avoid the sort of messiness (such as the mouse pointer wandering around in search of the right menu or button) which often results from making a more literal recording of screen actions. Moreover, since a new frame is only saved when a click or key press event occurs, you can happily take a lunch break half way through a recording session. This gives you a more leisurely and less error-prone way to record your movies. Add onto that the advantage of small file sizes and it’s clear that Demo Builder has a number of advantages. I should also add that it is, overall, a bit easier to use than some other screen recording tools. BB Flashback is arguably almost (but not quite) as easy to use. Camtasia is a good deal more complicated - largely due to its large range of features and options.

Verdict

If you want to make a completely accurate recording of screen activity, this is not the program for you. If you want to record a drawing ‘as it happens’ or if you want to make a complete recording for the purposes of debugging a problem, Demo Builder simply won’t do the job. But if, on the other hand, you want a simple and effective way of creating slick software demos or tutorials with many of the human errors ‘smoothed out’, Demo Builder would, in most cases, be an excellent choice.

Huw Collingbourne

January 2006