The concept of Jing is the always-ready program that instantly captures and shares images and video…from your computer to anywhere.

Cross posted from The Visual Lounge Blog

Sometimes words are not enough! Especially when you only have 140 characters on Twitter. Soon, you'll be able to easily add visuals and screencasts to Twitter with the click of a button in Jing!

There will be a Jing update on December 8 that will give you a fast and easy way to add your Jing screen captures and screencasts to Twitter!

How will it work? Simple! Set up a new Share button in Jing for Twitter.

Just as always, you will capture an image or make a video of your desktop

Share your capture by selecting the 'Twitter' button. A box will automatically pop up and you can create your tweet in the text box. Jing will post your tweet along with a link to your Jing screen capture or screencast.

That's it! Tweet away!

And, best of all, the price is right. This new feature is free to all Jing users! On December 8, Jing should alert you that there is a new update available. Update Jing and you should be ready to start tweeting your screen captures and Jing-casts!

Can't wait to see what you create! Jing me @betsyweber or @techsmith. Or, be sure to follow @jingtips for the latest tips and tricks all about Jing!

Let's say you've got a blog, website or maybe a wiki that supports embedded video. Dilemma: If you embed the video at full size, it'll take up your whole site. Or worse, it overflows your site like shown here. Yet if you record a small video, people will have a hard time seeing anything useful. Plus you might often want consistency such that all your videos are the same size initially.

In this post I'm going to show you how you can record full screen (or whatever size you want) and then present your video at a more reduced size. Viewers have the option of watching the video as is, or they can click the full screen button to enjoy your original dimensions.

I listed the steps below, but I also made a Jing video (2:30) where I show my process.

1. In Jing, make a new button that returns Screencast.com embed code. That's explained in detail here.
2. Next, make one of your stellar Jing videos. You can make it as large as you want.
3. When you're done with the video, click Stop and click your Screencast.com embed code button.
4. Now, paste the embed code into your blog, webpage, wiki, etc. Preview it. Is the video ginormus? We can fix that.
5. This next part gets a little into some math, but it's not bad. Get a piece of scratch paper and write down the height of your video over the width. You can see where to find the dimensions in this example.
6. Now, the key here is scaling the video but keeping the same aspect ratio. If you just lop off some arbitrary number of pixels from height and width it's possible your video will look cropped or squashed. You can reduce the height and width by multiplying the same percentage or, if you want to bust out some old school math dust off your cross multiplication skills. What's great about cross multiplication is that you can precisely define your desired width and the height will fall into place for you. Remember, once you get your new dimensions you must update the height in 4 locations in the code as well as the width.
7. That's it! Your video will be gracefully embedded at your specified dimensions and viewers have the luxury of viewing the original dimensions if they want!

Parting notes:

• This works for SWF and MPEG-4 video format. (Free and Pro versions). Recommended: Use Jing to upload your video and return the code. There is currently an issue where SWF videos put on Screencast.com manually may not scale appropriately. We believe we have a fix poised to be implemented.
• If I know I'm making a video I care about, I will usually hold Shift as I make the selection and then snap to 1280x720. I don't have to do any math because I just reduce each dimension by half and arrive at the popular and friendly size of 640x360. You can learn more about that on Brooks' YouTube in HD How-to video.
• Yeah, I probably should have made my example more extreme in that I recorded awfully close to 1280x720.

Let us know if this was helpful and understandable. Thanks!

There's lots of ways to learn things. Some people like visual, some like hands-on. Some like to read. How would you explain how Jing works to someone? We talk about fast visual communication, but what does that really mean?

What would be a different way to try and explain Jing? Do you think this video get the idea across? Would you be willing to send it on and help explain to others how Jing works?

Have you ever noticed tremendous file size variation with your videos? This is by far more common with the Flash SWF video format that is used in the free version of Jing, and it probably has to do with how much motion you're recording on the screen.

SWF is great in many ways because it's really great for the Web, captures pixel-perfect quality, and is royalty free to use. However it's not so good in that hardly any program can edit or convert it, has a frame limit, and it's not so good at capturing hi-motion content.

If you record something like a video game or web cam with the SWF video format, your file size will explode. In addition, it might start dropping frames leading to a "jerkier" video. MPEG-4 will provide a much better video.

Here's a lot more information and some side-by-side comparisons so you can see for yourself the difference in both the quality and file size of the videos.

Woah! We just found the very first Jing demo video we ever made. Anyone out there remember that interface? You'll have to click the video twice to get it to start playing.

Music: Kevin MacLeod

It's fun looking back sometimes...but not as fun as looking forward!

I thought I would go through the 'ol Feedback Email bag and pull out a few questions that seem to pop up now and again. I've tried to answer these awesome Jingers individually, but I'm guessing if people are taking the time to write us, there's probably a lot more of you out there with similar questions.

System Audio Recording

Jing is optimized for recording narration using a microphone. Jing detects and uses the default audio input device (which is usually the microphone). That said, people are going to want to record system audio (the computer sound or sound that comes out of your speakers.) You may be able to do it, but the key is changing the default audio input device. This may not be supported on all Vista machines. Check out this article for starters, and note at the bottom there is additional help for both Mac and Windows. This article was written for Camtasia Studio, but is equally applicable to Jing. It goes into a lot more troubleshooting and work-arounds, especially for Vista.

Selecting a Capture Size

We don't exactly go out of our way to expose it, but if you click and drag a selection while holding the Shift or Control key you can get a 16:9 (widescreen) or 4:3 (standard) aspect ratio that "snaps" to popular dimensions. Dimensions are important if you want high quality YouTube screencasts or want consistency on your blog or website.

Remember Where I Saved it Last Time!

Sorry, it should work the right way, but it's a Jing Windows bug that is fixed in the next release. However, this is a good opportunity to mention that you can setup a custom Save button to automatically to a particular location--even a network drive. Here's how to do it.

We shared Marc's Jing story last week. It's neat to see how people use Jing and often learn about a new application, in this case JiWire.

We were wondering if anyone out there would be willing to share their Jing stories with us--and more importantly--the Web. We have dual motives. We really want to understand how people are using Jing, and how it is and isn't quite meeting their ideal needs. This helps us prioritize and make Jing better. Sometimes we are exposed to ideas we've never even thought of.
Our second goal is to spread creative uses to the masses. People use Jing in ways others never consider. (Like using a webcam to share an image that's not on your computer.)

Do you have a story to share?

We are specifically looking for stories involving:

• Strategies for recording system audio (the sound from your computer speakers) with Jing.
• Using embed code for some purpose.
• Using Jing in educational settings, especially student use of Jing.
• Using Jing for business purposes.
• Examples of how Jing increased productivity in the workplace.
• Funny uses of Jing.

And even if you don't tell us your story, we hope you'll tell a person you know. We thank everyone who spreads the word.

In this 27-second video, some of Captain Jing's colleagues give him some ideas for what he might be for Halloween.

Do you still need a last-minute Halloween costume? You can dress up as Jing!

Here's what you need to do:

1. Put on a yellow turtleneck.
2. Some yellow face paint doesn't hurt.
3. Blow up three yellow balloons--not too big.
4. Get a marker and as best you can, draw the three Jing icons...like this:

5. Affix the balloons to a headband.
6. Put on the headband!

P.S. anyone who actually does this and sends us a picture gets a free "Jing: Show and Tell for Grown-Ups" T-Shirt.