Creating a screencast is something that we have visited very often with tools for creating screencasts on Windows, OS X, and Android being reviewed frequently. Screencasts are great when it comes to instructional content and they have only have one drawback; the size of a file. You can go for nice HD screencasts for something major like a product demo but for something that’s meant to provide quick instructions, you can instead settle for a faster loading GIF. Recordit is a free app for OS X and Windows that lets you record a screencast and turn it into a GIF. The GIF quality is excellent, better than what you would normally get if you used a third party app to create a GIF out of a video. With the app, you can create a 5min recording. The OS X app has a pro version that lets you control the frame rate and password protect your recording. It costs $39.99.

Once installed, Recordit adds a camera icon to the system tray. Click it to begin recording. Use the cursor to outline the area on your screen that you want to record.

Once you’ve outlined the recording area, a record button will appear just below it. Click it to begin recording. When you’re done, move your cursor outside the recording area and a Stop button will appear where the Record one did.

Once recording completes, you screencast is uploaded to the service and a link to the video is copied to your clipboard. You can play the video or right click to save it. On the video player, you will see the GIF button which, when clicked, will take you to the GIF of your video and you can save it just like any other image.

The app has no preferences to speak of except an option to start the app when you system boots. It’s enabled by default so if you don’t want yet another program dragging down system start up, you should disable it. The OS X version lets you share your videos or GIFs to Twitter as well and the feature is slated to be added to the Windows app soon. The system tray icon lets you view the recent videos you’ve uploaded. There is no indication as to how long a video or a GIF is stored online so you should save it when you can.

The GIF quality was pretty good but we have to ask, isn’t $39.99 a bit too much for frame rate control and password protection as far as the OS X app is concerned?

Download Recordit For Windows & OS X

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