How to use Loom to Record Your Screen for FREE

​Want to record your screen for free? Then Loom is the right tool for you. In this video, Scott Friesen shows you how to get started and all the settings you need to record great videos. From selecting your webcam and microphone to sharing with others, you'll be a Loom expert in no time!

Transcript:
​Do you want to record your screen, quickly, easily, and for free? Well then Loom is probably the best option for you. So in this video I'm going to show you everything you need to know to get started with Loom. Now, first things first, Loom is absolutely free for up to five minutes of video recording, and a total of 25 saved videos. And you can use Loom on any of your devices, including iOS and Android. For today's example, we're going to be looking at the desktop version, but the features and functionality is essentially the same across the different systems. So once Loom has been installed on your machine and you launch the Zoom app, you'll be presented with this dialogue. You'll also noticed here in the left-hand corner of the screen you can see my webcam, and I also have some controls which are creeping out from the side of my screen. Now, first things first, we need to decide what we want to record. By default, you typically will want to record both your screen and your camera, but that's not the only available options to us. By selecting this dropdown we can choose to only record the screen, which will make my webcam go away, or we can also choose to record just our webcam if you simply want to record a video. But in this case, I do want to record both my screen and my camera, so I'm going to keep that selection here. Next up, we can choose if we want to record the entire screen or if we just want to record a particular window on our computer. If you want to customize the recording window, you will need to upgrade to their paid plan. Within this dialogue, the only other two settings we want to pay careful attention to is our camera and our microphone. Many of us may have multiple webcams or multiple microphones available to us, so make sure you select the correct ones here. After hitting the recording button, you will receive a brief countdown, three, two, one, and now we are recording my screen along with my video. So maybe I want to discuss this spreadsheet with one of my colleagues, and I'm going to come in here and I can do whatever I want. I can change cells, I can go through a demo of a product, I can go to a web browser, whatever I want to. You'll notice on the left-hand side of the screen I have my countdown because the free version gives us a maximum of five minutes, it's counting down from five minutes. And the little red square lets me know that we are recording. If I hover my mouse over this area, I can choose to stop the recording or I can choose to restart, pause the video, or cancel the recording altogether. Now, if you do choose cancel, it will give us a prompt, are you sure you want to cancel or do you want to resume? In this case, I'm going to select resume, but if you do choose stop it will stop the recording immediately. What can be very helpful is to use this pause button because maybe I need to set something up on a new tab or a new application. I can come over here, select pause on my screen, and now I can maybe come up here and select a filter or sort the screen by some other means before I go back to recording what I'm doing. When I'm ready, all I need to do is come down here and select resume, and now I'm back to recording my screen. Now, whether you're in recording mode or in a pause mode, you can click and drag your webcam and move it to a different part of the screen. This can be most helpful if you want to make sure that your webcam is not in the way of something that you are showing as a part of your recording. When you're happy with your recording, all you need to do is come over here and select stop recording. Once you have finished your Loom recording, Loom will open up that recording in a new browser tab. So here you can see we have a preview of our video recording. Now, perhaps the first thing you will want to do is give your recording a different name than the default up above. As you can see, Recording Region Indicator and today's date is maybe not so helpful. So I can click my cursor up here and maybe I'm going to say this is a Sheets Tips and Tricks video, something along those lines. I can click anywhere else and now that title has been saved. It's going to indicate who made the recording, so all of your viewers will know when this recording was made. Within this screen, we can of course play back the recording, to make sure that this is something that we want to share, and we can also choose to watch it at a faster speed if we want to save some time. Now, before we share this video with anyone, we may want to cut out a few different clips or shorten the video as a whole. To do that, we want to come over here to the right-hand side and select trim and add clips. By selecting this option, we can take the total duration of the video and maybe I want to cut out the ending. So I'm going to click and drag my cursor, so now this is a minute and 30 in total rather than the nearly two minutes that I have originally recorded. But in many cases, you don't want to just reduce the beginning or the end, maybe I want to take out this middle section. All I need to do is drag my cursor and find the place where I want to cut out. So maybe I need to hit play just to make sure that I want to cut out this part here when I'm talking about the recording console. I'm going to select Split to Trim, and what that's going to do is going to cut a point right there. Next up, I just need to find the place that I want to return to and I'm going to select Split to Trim here. Now you can see I have three distinct sections for my video, All I need to do is select this middle section here and I'm going to select Delete that clip. It'll still be visible here, but you can see that there is a lightly shaded area behind it. So if I start playing this clip here, it will immediately jump to the very next section, so people who are viewing this video will not see this component down below. While in this editing screen, you always have the option to undo or redo, or if I want to I can also revert to the original. When I'm happy with my changes, all I need to do is select Save changes. Now that we're happy with our finished video, we can come up to the top right-hand corner and select the copy link, the link being copied to our clipboard. We can now share this video with anyone. But if you want to adjust some of your sharing settings, you'll want to select the Share button. Here within the Share Dialogue, I can invite certain members of my team or input certain email addresses that I would like to share this video with. Pay special attention to this bottom dropdown menu, you can see that by default, anyone with the link can view it, but perhaps I only want to share this with members of my Loom Workspace, or only people that I've added up above. if that's the case, I can select these options down below. I can also make some tweaks such as sharing this video at a certain timeframe, this can be very helpful if you don't have time to edit or trim your overall video, and you just want to start sharing the video at a particular timestamp. We can click anywhere else on the screen and then be returned to our video editing options. Now, an additional benefit of using the Loom Screen Recording Service is that we can keep track of how often our videos have been watched, and also allow viewers to comment and also record their comments within the Loom Player. On the left-hand side of the screen, all we need to do is select the My library section, and here we will see all of the videos which we have recorded within Loom. You will notice in the top right-hand corner of the screen, it lets me know that I have used 6 of my 25 free videos. You can have a total of 25 videos, before you may need to delete some of these videos if you choose to stay within the free plan. So here on this video, I can see that it has already been viewed, and someone has commented and reacted to it. So if I click on this video, I can go into those details, I can scroll down to the bottom and see exactly when they watched this video, 55 minutes ago. I can see what comment they've added, and perhaps they've added their comment at a certain time. This can be especially beneficial if you want to see what people are commenting on, or if they're addressing something specifically in that video. Returning to the My library screen, we can also take some bulk actions on our videos. So if I select these three videos, for example, I can come down to the bottom, and I can either share them with specific people, or edit their settings as a whole. I can choose to move them to a different folder, I can archive or delete those videos all with just a single click. And when I'm ready to record my next video, I can either launch it from my desktop, or I can select this record a video button here in the lower left hand portion of my screen. Now, if you have questions about how to use Loom for screen recording, be sure to let me know in the comments down below. And if you're interested in more free tools to make your life that much easier, be sure to watch this video next. Thank you so much for watching. And remember, being productive does not need to be difficult, in fact, it's very simple.