Screencast-O-Matic

If you do any kind of screencasting to create video tutorials or for any other purpose you might want to check out Screencast-O-Matic (great name huh?). This is an unbelievably easy tool to use to capture your onscreen activity. You can record audio via a microphone and have the option to upload and use their server space or save your video as a Quicktime file. It is web-based so you need to be online when you use it but you can record work in offline applications such as Word or anything else you might want to demonstrate. Once you are done recording you can add notes to different portions of the video that will allow your viewers to jump to those sections and read your comments, which will appear as unobtrusive pop-ups at the bottom of the viewing screen. I tried this out and without even signing up for an account I was able to make a simple clip that I then brought into Final Cut Pro (though I imagine it would work in other editors as well) and incorporated into a larger video project I was editing. I didn't need to record audio so I can't comment on that but the video quality was quite good. I'm really not sure what they could do to make this tool any easier to use. It may not have all the features you are used to in a screen capture tool but you can't beat the ease of use and quality for the price (free). You can check out the demo video below to get a better idea of how this tool works.