Ramblings of a Bald Man

I don’t use Skype a whole lot. I’ve used it mainly at work to help professors connect to authors and guest speakers during class. This is a very cheap and inexpensive way to have a “video conference” with somebody during class without having to pay for plane tickets, hotel rooms and meals. Some professors have wanted to record this conversations. We have some sophisticated software that could do that, but we don’t have licensing to install it wherever we want. I also thought it might be useful to record some things through Skype for my podcast, so I started looking into some options. I found this site - How to Record Skype Conversations - which talks about a lot of free/inexpensive software out there to do this. I was mainly interested in just the free stuff because I didn’t really want to pay out anything if I don’t use it more than once.

I downloaded PrettyMay and installed it. You get a 15-day free trial. It seems to work pretty well. Records both the audio coming out of my speakers and my microphone. On playback things sounded a bit weird, but that’s just because I was getting some feedback due to microphone/speaker placement in my office. Usually when you’re doing something like this a headset works much better to reduce feedback and weird noises.

I also downloaded PowerGramo Recorder, but haven’t installed it yet. These both had free trials and sounded like they worked ok. If I give PowerGramo a shot, I’ll let you know what I thought of it.

Recording Video is a little bit more complicated than just audio. I did a few searches and read about a few different things. All the software I found just records streaming video on your screen. We have Camtasia here at work. Seems like that would do that same thing. One thing to keep in mind is that you don’t necessarily record both cameras. If you do the picture-in-picture thing you’ll get the big picture of whomever you’re talking to with the little corner picture of yourself. Some professors have setup mini-DV cameras in the back of the room while doing this to capture everything. Seems a little bit backwards, but they can then record the students in the room as well.