Presentations - Do you use a hardware device to capture laptop video output?

You need to capture a presenters’ laptop, and they’re using PowerPoint. You decide to use a screen capture software like Camtasia or ScreenFlow.

While this may be ok in some scenarios, there are many situations where software capture is not an ideal way to capture screens, instead, you should consider a hardware solution.

Using software like Camtasia or Screenflow, you can't guarantee you'll capture the actual output of the laptop.

Another issue is how long it will take you to process the screen recording for editing later; you will need to convert the screen recording from its native format to something like h.264 mp4, which can take a while.

Using a hardware solution, you are able to capture whatever the output of the laptop is, so it doesn’t matter if the presenter changes from extended to duplicated, you will always capture the image being sent to the projector.

Another benefit of using hardware capture is a direct recording of an editable format, for example, a h.264 MP4 file that can be used in your video editor of choice.