Looking for a simple, cheap tool for capturing your screen, recording your webcam and editing your videos?

Today I’m going to give you an overview of how Screencast-O-Matic works and what you can do with it.


Why Screencast-O-Matic?

It’s not my personal favorite editing tool (I prefer ScreenFlow for Mac), but it’s affordable and does what you need it to do for $15/year.

Free vs Pro

Free features include:

  • 15-minute recordings
  • Screen and webcam recording
  • Publish to YouTube, and
  • Save as video file
  • With watermark

Pro features include:

  • No watermark
  • Longer recordings
  • Record computer audio (Windows only)
  • Edit tools
  • Scripted Recordings
  • Draw and zoom
  • Publish to Google Drive, Vimeo, Dropbox, and
  • Screenshot tool

As you can see, even with just the free features, you can do a lot with this tool.

How to Use Screencast-o-matic

First, head over to http://screencast-o-matic.com/download. You can choose to launch the application from your web browser or install the full application so you can work offline.

For this tutorial, I’m going to work from my browser. To record using Screencast-o-matic, just follow the steps below.

  1. Go to http://screencast-o-matic.com/ and login
  2. Click Start Recorder to launch the recorder and follow the instructions when prompted
  3. Click Launch Application
  4. Choose whether to record your Screen, Webcam or Both. For this tutorial, I’m going to click Screen.
  5. Drag the edges of the screen recording box to select the area of the screen you want to record.
  6. Click the Record button when you’re ready.
  7. Hit the Pause button. To continue recording, simply hit Record again. Click Done once you’re ready to move on to editing.
  8. After clicking Done, you have a few options: Save As Video File, Upload to Screencast-O-Matic, Edit, Redo and Delete. For this tutorial, let’s say you want to Edit the recording.

Video Editing Using Screencast-O-Matic

In the editing screen, you’ll find different tools like

  • Cut (to trim parts of your video)
  • Hide Cursor
  • Copy
  • Narrate
  • Insert
  • Overlay
  • Replace
  • Speed
  • Transition
  • Volume
  • Resize
  • Crop
  • Opacity

These tools are very straightforward to use, as you can see in the video above.

  1. Once you’re happy with your edits, click Done and Save As Video File.
  2. Under Video File, select publish options such as file type, file name, which folder you want to save it in, video quality and how you want the cursor to appear.
  3. Click Publish.

Screencast-O-Matic is a very easy tool to use. Go ahead and give it a try at http://screencast-o-matic.com/ and if you have any questions, drop them in the comments below.