How to Record Your Screen with No Lag

Recording computer screen with software gets popular worldwide since it creates a face-to-face communication, or a hand-by-hand solution to demonstrate and share knowledge with people. It’s widely used as tutorial and presentation authoring tool in education, tranining, entertainment and online marteking fields.

However, making screencast asks for higher computer hardware requirements to ensure the high video quality, animated visual effect and synchronous narration. Many people find their computer is heavily slowed down when recording, making their videos blunt and ambiguous.

In fact, under the majority of cases, the video lag can be effectively moderated and solved. Here are some useful tips on how to record your screen with no lag. Have a try before making your next screencast.

Close all unnecessary applications before recording

The whole process of screencasting requires plenty system resources to run smoothly. The extra loading time and redundant responding time will appear if there’re too many processes which do not benefits to your screencasting at the same time, slowing down your video and making it unwatchable. This is the first thing you should do, check your system task manager and find out if there’s any extra program might do harm to your screencast, end them at once.




Set right resolution for your computer screen

The higher screen resolution you choose, the more RAM it costs. Since screen recorder captures any changes of every pixel on your computer screen, when you record screencast in a higher resolution, more data information will be recorded, indicating more memory will be occupied.




In that case, lag always happens if your whole screen alters rapidly (because of the frequent data exchange), so adjust your screen resolution to a lower but acceptable level to reduce the data of the changes on the screen. Generally, 800*600 is enough for most of demo tutorial videos.




Another way is to customize your recording area. Now most of screen recording software allow you to customize your recording area, so you can create your screencast by recording a particular part of your screen.




Simplify the display color quality



Do you like to set your desktop in higher color display? And is it necessary while screen recording? It’s hard to distinguish between the 16bit and 32bit color by human’s eyes, but it is rather a big difference for computer. Why not set your screen in lower color quality and save running resource?




Right click on your desktop and choose "Properties", then change your color quality from 32bit to 16 bit in setting page.






Furthermore, if it is possible, change your screen refresh rate is also a great way to reduce the system resource consumption. It’s commonly used in screencast which contains more simple frozen pictures than movies. You can set it at 60 Hertz, that’s enough for screencast and does no harm to your eyes while recording.




Lower your recording frame rate

The frame rate describes how frequent the program capture image for your screencast in every second. For desktop demo and tutorial, 10~15 frame is enough to make your video clear and smooth. If you’re preparing to make a gameplay or movie recording, you have to set it higher.



Meanwhile, disable hardware acceleration will help you to reduce the laggy rate. But sometimes it fails when you want to record some games which require hardware acceleration on.




It’s quite confusing for a beginner to adjust the frame rate perfectly to adapt to what he records. Once you meet this tough job and don’t know how to do, try some simple programs with lazy settings. There’re two popular recording modes: the screen shots and full motion recording. The former takes every shot according to your mouse click and keystrokes, and the latter records all your movement as a video, so you don’t need to bother with the setting. Just choose the recording mode and check whether it work well with no lag.




It’s quite confusing for a beginner to adjust the frame rate perfectly to adapt to what he records. Once you meet this tough job and don’t know how to do, try some simple programs with lazy settings. There’re two popular recording modes: the screen shots and full motion recording. The former takes every shot according to your mouse click and keystrokes, and the latter records all your movement as a video, so you don’t need to bother with the setting.




Optimize the audio input

The audio of screencast is also a key section of system resource consumption, since you have to import your voice through microphones which will take up some system RAM to keep it works properly. The best way, as you consider that the audio is not a must-have and can be omitted, is to disable the sound while recording computer screen. You will find much more efficient recording progress with fluency.



Certainly, if you want to keep the sound, voice and even music in your video, try to record it seperatedly. Screen recorder like DemoCreator has a build-in Audio Editor to add narration for your screencast, or directly import an audio file into it. It really eases the burden of OS, making the screencast fluently.




Fraps recording lags

For people who bother with Fraps while recording gameplay, there are also some tips of getting rid of the lag issue. Besides the six points mentioned above, you can change the settings like decrease recording fps, uncheck sound, disable special visual effect in game, low rendering quality, etc. You can adjust the game fresh rate as the same as screen fresh rate, so that the lesser CPU uses.




Recording screen game is mainly held back by the CPU. If you find all things above fail, you need to consider to update your computer, indeed.




Summary

Well, that’s all the tips you can make your screencast easy and smooth. There’s one thing have to mention that more and more powerful screencast software with fantastic features are coming out. In order to make full use of them, the best way is to choose the program wisely, and don’t forget to speak up your requirement to the developer. Our aim is, to record your screen with no lag.