14 DAY TRIAL // A screencast is a digital recording of computer screen output, often containing audio narration. Despite the fact that the term dates from 2004, Lotus ScreenCam and other similar products were used as early as 1993. The main problems at that time were the facts that resulting files were very large and the editing features were rather basic.
Most of the recent products use Macromedia Flash or similar file formats, as well as being able to perform advanced editing tasks, such as mouse movement editing, the ability to use audio and video templates and more.
The screencasts are the natural steps that follow screenshots accompanied by commentaries, and they are really useful for demonstrating software features and for creating educational content.
Screen Mimic is a program developed by Polarian Technology that is able to create screencasts, and its latest version, 2.0, has added audio support. From now on, recording from the default input device or inserting an audio file after finishing recording can be done in a snap. If you are wondering about the audio file formats supported, then you should know that everything working with QuickTime can be used by Screen Mimic as audio track, and I think that this is fair enough.
With Screen Mimic, you can record your Mac OS X desktop and your actions as movies that can be saved into the following formats: Adobe Flash SWF, Flash Video FLV, and QuickTime MOV files. Once you saved your work, you can upload the result to a web site or use it in a kiosk system, as well as many other applications. At last, you can save your recordings to Screen Mimic Bundle format for later processing.
The price of this program is 64.95$, while to upgrade from version 1.x, you have to pay 39.95$. To run it, you need Mac OS X 10.4 or better, and a free demo that is limited to maximum 15 second per recording can be downloaded from the official web site.