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May 01 2008
Nov. 24, 2009
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Screencasting from Your Desktop with ScreenFlow
Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4
In this dialog box, you tell ScreenFlow which signal streams to record (my sincerest apologies for the corny "Listen up kids, there's stuff to learn!" pose...)
Capture This!
Installing ScreenFlow on your Mac is as easy as dragging and dropping the application from its disk image into your Applications folder. The audio driver required by the software is installed "behind the scenes" when you first launch the application.
Quite obviously, every new screencast project starts with a fresh recording, and, consequently, the first thing to greet you after launching ScreenFlow is the Configure Recording dialog box. It's in this dialog box that you select what, exactly, should be captured, and you can freely mix-and-match four A/V sources:
- Video from the computer's desktop
- Video from a camera (built-in iSight or external cam)
- Audio from a CoreAudio-compliant external source like a microphone or USB headset
- Computer audio
If this makes you worry about the grabbing performance, don't! The Vara Software developers have done a very decent job of optimizing their code, and the screen-grabbing performance is very impressive. As an example, running on a MacBook with a 2GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 2 GB of RAM, ScreenFlow managed to capture five QuickTime movies running concurrently without inducing too much stuttering in the resulting screencast movie.
ScreenFlow managed to grab five concurrently running QuickTime movies on a 2GHz MacBook without any major hiccups (Click to watch video.)
Once you hit the record button, or press the corresponding keyboard short-cut, to trigger the recording, ScreenFlow gracefully moves out of the way, presents a configurable count-down, and then your computer screen becomes your stage. Since you can assign any hard disk as your ScreenFlow "scratch disk," you won't run out of disk space even when recording longer screencasts, either.
From Raw Screengrab to Polished Screencast
Recording what's on a Mac's screen isn't really such a big deal, and there are a number of other software tools that can do this. It's when you stop your recording and are being taken to ScreenFlow's main window, that you'll notice the difference.
ScreenFlow's main window with my freshly recorded Magic Mouse Tool movie
ScreenFlow's main screen is divided into three sections: a real-time preview of your movie, a Properties pane on the right, and the timeline at the bottom.
One of the panes in the Properties section is the Media Bay. Any tracks you record with ScreenFlow are stored here, and you can also import existing movies into the Media Bay or trigger a new ScreenFlow recording for adding fresh content.
Speaking of the Media Bay, one important feature in ScreenFlow is its non-destructive editing. No matter which edits you apply to a track, you will never lose your original recordings unless you delete them from the Media Bay. Non-destructive editing is a very useful safe-guard and is found in many media editing applications, but the way the Vara Software folks have implemented this is unusually elegant and intuitive. Even when you split or trim a track in the timeline, effectively cutting off sections from it, you can always drag out the left and right edges of the resulting clippings to bring back the removed parts.
