Built-in tools for screencasting on a PC

- If you want to record your screen, there's a little-known built-in tool that you'll find in Windows that makes this easy. It's actually part of the Xbox experience and it's often used by gamers but you can use it to record most things on your computer. Go to the Start menu here and you could locate the Xbox Game Bar. Click to launch it. This allows you to control what you see and which widgets are being currently active. I'll go over here to the Capture widget. And this controls what we're recording. Now, generally speaking, you can't capture the operating system as a movie. Let's go ahead and launch Adobe Photoshop instead. And I'm going to create a new document. Now, before I do anything, let's go back to the Game Bar. You can also customize the keyboard shortcuts for this under Settings. For example, I've mapped the Game Bar to Alt + Shift + G. So while I'm in Photoshop here, Alt + Shift + G. That brings it up. Now, if you go to Capture and the video's grayed out, go ahead and open up the settings, close it, go back in. Then click Alt + Shift + G and it will likely recognize the app. That's because it has to see the app here for capture. You can't record video of the operating system. Now, if needed, you can go into the settings themselves here and I suggest edit preferences in Windows Settings. This gives you more control. Now what you could do is take a look at the overall settings. For example, I can go to Captures here and adjust things. What's the quality of the audio, for example? What's the maximum record length? What frame rate am I going to use and what's the video quality? It gives me the ability to bump it up to high quality if needed. This'll improve the overall quality of what you do. Now when you're all set, you can go ahead and invoke that record. So Alt + Shift + G. I see that I'm recording, that's fine. If I take a look at the audio here, I see what's coming in. So I'll go to voice and make sure that my microphone is selected. It looks good. So I'll click Record. There's my capture status. Now I'm free to go about working. Don't worry, this little part of the user interface is not actually being recorded. Let's go ahead and do a real quick tutorial. Inside of Adobe Photoshop, there's a lot of different options built in. When you go to create a new document, you'll notice some templates, for example. These gives you the ability to try out different designs. For example, if we were creating an award show, I can go to this Awards Night title graphic. And when ready, I can click Open. This'll bring in a new layered graphic. You'll notice lots of different elements here that could be turned on or off as you're customizing the design and inside are different pieces, so you can select those and adjust options like the opacity to blend it back in. Okay, notice here, I have some additional control. I may want to make sure that I click stop here to review. Let's bring back up that shortcut, Alt + Shift + G for the Game Bar. And I'll click stop. Notice, make sure that the microphone itself is enabled without a cross through it. Now you could choose to show all captures. And there's my record. This lets me see a gallery or a list of everything that I've made and if needed, I can click to view the file location and it'll take me to the file at the explore level. Here's a traditional movie ready to use in another program. This built-in tool works quite well. Now, if you'd like to also explore recording the operating system level, then you can go to PowerPoint. PowerPoint is not technically built in but it is something that most users will have on their computer in the Windows operating environment. What you could do is create a blank presentation. Then click on the Insert menu. You can now go to Media and choose Screen Recording. This will use a built-in tool. You can now select the area, choose whether or not to use the microphone and whether or not the cursor is collected. For example, I can draw this to define the entire screen. And when I'm ready, click record. So this is us recording. We're inside the application here, we can continue to work and make global adjustments and when we're all done, we press that keyboard shortcut of Windows key + Shift + Q. You see that it added it to the slide. Now, what you could do here is this has put it onto the slide itself. However, if needed, you could see Save Media As. This will bring up the ability for you to save this file. This'll save it as a media file and we can go ahead and save that out and I'll just save that to the Desktop for now. You'll notice, there's the media file. And our record as well. Both of these built-in tool options have a few limitations but if you are on a tight budget, they work and they shouldn't cost you anything extra. But let's explore some third-party tools next that might be helpful.