Charles Lau dot Com

I recently bought HyperCam 2 (aff) from Hyperionics at USD$39.95 and I think it is pretty good to use. Hence I decided to do a affiliated recommendation in software review. I think that it is great to share it out on my blog for everybody to take a good look at it.
I have been looking for a software to do a video presentation at an affordable price for quite some time. A lot of people has been using Camtasia Studio to do their presentation but it costs USD$299 which converts to S$452 in my country. I know of this Hyperionics company since they are famous for Screen Capturing software especially with their famous HyperSnap.

This software is pretty much simple with 5 option tabs:

• Screen Area
• Hot Keys
• AVI File
• Sound
• Other Options

You can select a regional screen area to capture your screen actions, adding a border (rectangle) with optional blinking effect. You can choose how your HyperCam window should be placed while your video capturing is in progress with the 3 radio options of leaving it opened, iconize it, or hide it.

Those layered/transparent windows (Example in Microsoft Word, you see Office Assistant? That’s semi-transparent window.) can be captured as well. This effect is found only in Windows XP and 2000.

While your HyperCam is hidden, you might need to press that button to stop recording without showing your tool to the public! That’s where the hot keys come in…

This is the setting for the directory where your video is recorded in.

You can choose the recording sample from your microphone that you are presenting.

This is where your mouse cursor is set. And you can even put in screen notes on the screen for your viewers to see while you are presenting.

Lastly, here’s a video presentation of the HyperCam 2 itself.

Conclusion
I just find HyperCam 2 pretty much cheaper at the price of US$39.95. And I can do almost everything I need to do my presentation in this blog as well as on my other websites.

The pros are that it is definitely affordable to buy, and the functions are very simple to use and understand. In just a while, you can start doing a powerful presentation with this program itself. It is definitely suitable for anyone who just needs to do a presentation once on his own computer, and the whole world will be able to watch it anytime. Moreover, it is saved in AVI which can be easily converted to flash videos with many programs out there.

The con is that it is not able to produce flash presentation straight. But this loophole is definitely covered with the introduction of YouTube where we can upload it and get this presentation up and running without hurting our bandwidth even. But it is definitely not suitable if you are to sell your presentation through subscriptions like Michael Cheney’s Adsense Videos (aff) since your videos have to be stored on your own server and not on YouTube.

You may want to download the demo to try it out.