Screencasting from Your Desktop with ScreenFlow
Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4

Make 'Em Look Good

For sprucing up the media you've recorded and compiled in the Media Bay, the Properties section is where it's at. You can massage numerous properties for video, audio, screen recording (e.g., visualization of key presses), and callouts. With the Properties panels working as inspectors, any changes you make to the properties are directly applied and also reflected in the preview, so you can tweak them in real time. Farewell, Apply buttons, and please don't come back, hear me?!

Changes in the Properties are applied globally to the currently selected track, or tracks, unless you add so-called Actions to a track. If you're familiar with audio or video editing, think of ScreenFlow's Video Actions, Audio Actions, and Screen Recording Properties as analogies for fades. By adding them to a track in the timeline, you can set properties differently for the segment before and after the Action, and ScreenFlow smoothly morphs between the settings for the duration of the Action. For Callouts, the settings are applied as long as the Action lasts.

As with any other features in ScreenFlow, the way you edit tracks in the timeline -- including any Actions or Callouts you've added to these tracks -- is very intuitive and almost entirely mouse-based. What really impressed me, though, is that the Vara guys have thought these edit functions through to the end. For example, the timeline has a snap-to function. Move an Action along a track, and its left and right edges will snap to Actions on neighboring tracks. This makes for effortless synchronization of Action effects. You can even select a number of Actions on several tracks and drag out either edge on any one of these, and they will be dragged out in parallel. In other words, everything in the timeline works just like it is supposed to work!

Sharing with the World

So, you've recorded a great screencast, added a choice selection of delicious effects, edited it to perfection, and maybe even sprinkled it with some tasty background music -- in other words, it's ready to be sent out into the wild of the Internet. Then it's time to export your polished screencast to a QuickTime file.

Tweak the exported movies to your heart's content

ScreenFlow comes with a number of useful presets for exporting, but you can also fully customize the audio and video settings with the standard QuickTime options dialog box. And if you're not happy with the result, you can always go back to ScreenFlow and keep polishing that screencast -- it's non-destructive, remember?

See it in Action

I wouldn't be surprised if some of my explanations so far seem a bit cryptic, e.g., that paragraph on editing in the timeline, and maybe you would have liked to see a few more screenshots.

To that, I say: pah! Screenshots... Who needs screenshots when you can have screencasts!

That's why I created a little screencast of a screencast, so you can see -- and hear -- how I edited the Magic Mouse Tool video in ScreenFlow.

Editing the Magic Mouse Tool video in ScreenFlow (Click to watch video.)

Close Move