For video clips for communication, such as showing someone on a digital bug report what you’re trying to do or showing the timing to reproduce something I’m a fan of Cockos Incorporated | LICEcap.
I’ve tried using video for exploratory work. I did like that I could review my work to see if I actually did what I thought I did, and it helped me to catch intermittent problems or fleeting screen artefacts. I sometimes reviewed what I did to see how I might improve on it.
However that came with some important drawbacks. I think explaining them might help your search for tooling (with regards to your session review use case)
Because the exploration inherent to testing doesn’t expose my internal structure (what my hypotheses may be, risks I’m testing for, setup I’m doing, branching I’m doing, tangents I’m going off on, things I’m noticing, emotions I’m responding to, techniques I’m applying, when I defocus, etc) or external structure not on the screen (other devices, conversations with others, printed materials, windows I’m not recording right now) I have to expose that in my notes.
I have to balance the effort I put into these notes. I want the notes so that I can build the story of my testing and update catalogues and artefacts, and for some proof of my efforts, and to combat my short memory. However, every second I spend writing notes is a second that I’m not exploring the product, and stopping to write notes can interrupt the flow of an idea.
Video feels like a good way to lessen the pressure on note-taking, because your activities are recorded. But they’re not really, because the video doesn’t contain your internal structure. It is not capturing your testing, it’s capturing what your testing looks like to someone standing behind you. If you want the video to make sense to you later, or to anyone else, you have to write notes either in view of the recording or with timestamps and the like, or it’ll simply fail to show what you were trying to do and what you learned by doing it. You end up writing notes for the imaginary viewer of the video. This may actually mean more notes, or a different style of notes, which may impact your testing.
Another issue with video is how off the rails your exploration goes. If you start a session and you’re on-mission and suddenly you find a big problem, or you start coming up against bugs, you then have to stop your recording and name your file and so on. Or you have to spend time investigating the bug and writing a report. This effort of starting/stopping/pausing/saving/naming/updating artefacts with your recording can give your testing more inertia, and make it feel less flexible. It feels like a little emotional cost every time you want to stop or start or change.
I think video works at its best when it’s not for communication or archive, but as a way to expose intermittent problems, provide review for recent activity, or even as a way to improve your own attention - you can concentrate on multiple things by watching everything multiple times. I sometimes used to record folder watchers and filtered log tailors and such as I test, because it’s easier to see logs in real time than to match up the timestamps with what you thought you were doing when they appeared. One advantage of this sort of thing is that you don’t have to store these videos, unless they contain something you want to save with comments, or use in communication surrounded by explanation. You can make your internal ideas about mission and risk and technique explicit when it’s useful to do so.
I think video does have a place, especially for particular cases, and if you can do all the recording for free and have inexpensive and secure storage for it, then the cost can be relatively low. Don’t forget that you have to pause the video for lunch, or create multiple videos of one session. And that screen recording takes system resources. I’d definitely try it with any old recording software first and see how your idea of it mixes with reality, as that was illuminating for me.
Another possibility is voice recording. You may find it easier to speak what you’re doing than write it. You can then use STT to convert to text, if you like. Personally I need to write to think properly, and I rarely worked in environments that would love me loudly saying what I’m doing.
The vast majority of screen recorders only seem to record screens. Concerning the extras you’re looking at I think that Yattie is moving in a positive direction to handle these sorts of problems, and it feels like it’s written by someone who wants to integrate video evidence more seamlessly into the note-taking process in a way that’s compatible with session-based work. It’s made some good moves towards being a professionally usable tool, too. It’s worth considering for any tool what happens if it crashes - do you lose all your valuable progress?
Incidentally Windows has a game bar feature with a screen recorder on it. Select the window to record as the active window, press Win-G, click the camera at the top. A little recording window appears. Click the small circle icon to start recording, then click anywhere on the screen to return to what you’re doing. Press Win-G again to be able to stop the recording. Start/Stop recording has a shortcut, too: Win-Alt-R. Certainly has its limitations, but a useful thing to know.