Video Annotations

(From the main menu, choose Tools->Video Annotations)

This feature requires a webcam to be installed on your system. The Video Annotations window is essentially a webcam window. By placing a webcam window on your desktop, you can record its content along with other screen content when the webcam window is inside your recording region.

Video Annotations

The Video Annotation window does not only stream video content to your desktop. You can also add a text caption, make a cutout region, or set transparency values (Win 2000 / XP only) to the video annotation just like you did for screen annotations. To do so, right-click on the webcam window to display a menu like this:

Video Annotations context menu

The Edit Text, Edit Image and Edit Transparency commands have already been covered in the section on Screen Annotations and will not be re-explained here.

Refresh Rate

Edit Refresh Rate dialog

The refresh rate indicates the number of times (frames) CamStudio will attempt to capture an image from your webcam and display it on your screen. The actual rate will usually be much lesser, especially for large sized images.

Important:

Video Source

You can use the video source dialog to select your webcam or video source for the video annotation. You can also set the brightness, contrast, gain, exposure and other settings related to your webcam video.

Video Format

The video format dialog is used for selecting the dimensions of your webcam or video source image. You can also set the pixel depth and compression (e.g RGB24, RGB32) of your video.

Note: You are advised to choose a small dimension (e.g 160 x 120) for the video format, as a large sized format will slow down your system significantly.

The video source and video format dialog boxes will vary on different systems. Its implementation will very much depend on the vendor of your webcam.