Outside of our IT area, I think I’m the only person here at work that uses PowerShell.

I want to record some videos showing how I use PowerShell to solve some of our daily problems, so I went looking for screen recording software.

I discovered that Microsoft Expression Encoder 4 (SP2) seems to be available as a free download.

(You may remember Microsoft’s Expression suite of products from a few years ago. It looked to me like Microsoft wanted to take on Adobe in the design field – but Adobe has that market pretty well locked up).

Expression Encoder is a non-linear editing (NLE) software package for editing and encoding video. The package includes a Screen Capture tool that allows you to define an area of your Windows desktop to be recorded. Once you’ve defined the recording area, you hit the familiar red record button and everything you do within that area is recorded to a file with an .XESC file extension.

You can preview the .XESC files in the Screen Capture utility, or send them to Expression Encoder for editing and or saving as .WMV files.

The free download does not include the codecs needed to read .MPG (standard video) files or save files as .MP4 (the popular format used by non-Windows devices), but there are a number of free tools that will convert .WMV files to .MP4 files.

One thing I discovered from recording some PowerShell work – I definitely want to script my actions in PowerShell before starting to record, if possible. I had to re-do some actions to make the video smoother.