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.

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.

You may not have thought of it, but you can use Jing Pro's Webcam Feature to take a single Image-snapshot as well.
I usually use this feature whenever I quickly want to show something that is not on my screen, such as:

• The keys I found in the hallway - anyone looking for them?
• The latest addition to my beer stein collection. Mike has to see this!
• My pristine A-Team action figures, as demonstrated in this video:

By using Jing's Webcam feature, I don't have to find my digital camera, take the picture and upload it.
It's a lot faster to take the snapshot with Jing. I can annotate it if i want, and then I can upload it to Screencast.com and share the link just as fast.
Sure, it's not exactly a 5 megapixel image like my digital camera can give me. But it works for most of my communication needs, and it saves so much time.

Can you think of other uses for this feature?

Ian Ozsvald is a screencasting machine! Ian has written a great blog post about how to make a screencast with Jing in 30 minutes!

In this screencast tutorial, Ian will show you:

• How to start recording with Jing on Windows (it works the same on Mac)
• How to upload your recording
• How to get a reminder of the shortcut URL that it magically gives you after the upload is complete
• The Handbook's Google Group where you are encouraged to share your screencasts so we can help you improve

Ian's screencast runs just over 6 minutes. Be sure to check out Ian's full blog post here about making a screencast with Jing in the next 30 minutes.

Ian is a professional screencaster who has made 170 screencasts since 2005! Ian is also working on 'The Screencasting Handbook'! This is a great resource for any screencaster. To be first in line for the release of the Handbook, you just have to sign-up on the mailing list here (by signing up you'll get a discount on the early releases of the book).

Screencast on, Ian! Thanks for sharing your knowledge and making the world better screencasters!

When I'm making a Jing video, I like to conserve my viewer's time and my time. What do I mean?

An example is if I am uploading a file. I don't think my viewer cares to watch the 12-second progress bar. Likewise, they might not appreciate me fumbling around trying to bring up the right window or document. In cases like this I pause the recording.

To pause the video you can press the pause button, but it does take a second or two and the viewer can see your cursor trail off to find the button. A faster way is to use the pause/resume hotkey.

On Windows, press F8, to pause and resume your recording. (Make sure video hotkeys are enabled in More > Preferences.)

On Mac, the pause hotkey is the same as your capture hotkey. By default this is Command + Shift + 1. Press the hotkey again to resume your recording.

New to Jing? Or do you sometimes teach others about Jing and wish you had a handy handout? Then you might want to check out this Welcome to Jing Guide. This PDF will show you everything you need to know to take your first screen capture:

• Install and set up Jing
• Launch Jing
• Take a Capture (Image or Video)
• Save or Share your Capture
• Next Steps

And since it's a PDF, it's easy to save it, share it and print it.

We'd love to hear what you think! Is the information we cover sufficient? What is missing? When you first used Jing, what was the one thing you wish we had told you? Thanks for your input & helping to make a better Jing.