ScreenFlow: Creating professional screencasts
Making online screencasts such as product demos and tutorial videos has become very big. ScreenFlow is a screen recording application that lets you capture your entire screen and everything you do on it and then export it out to a file that you later can upload to the web and have viewers everywhere in the world view.
Starting a recording in ScreenFlow is as simple as it can be. All you do is select what you want to record, microphone audio, webcam video, computer screen or computer audio. You can choose to record whichever one of these as you want. Being able to record your webcam video is a big plus and a real time saver from having to do it and later edit the video together. When you’ve done that, all you do is hit the record button and off you go! You don’t need to worry about sizes until later!
Editing Capabilities
What I really, really love about ScreenFlow is the built in editing features. It’s not that I can’t take it into a video editor like Final Cut and edit the video, but it takes a whole lot longer to achieve the same effects.
In the editor, you can cut, bring in other media and generally edit your clips to make a good screencast. You can also add effects like Callouts (for both the mouse pointer and windows) as well adding text, which is really powerful. If you’ve got more than one clip, or if you bring in images in the video, you can scale, rotate and animate these in the timeline by using the video actions. It is stylish but really simple.
Never Worry About the Size
Well, almost never. When you are finished recording you have the option to crop the screen area (non-destructively within the ScreenFlow document) to a specific size. If you just want to compress it, you do that when you export your clip out at the end. Cropping is good when you want to make sure you don’t get any letterboxing when exporting to the format of choice.
Conclusion
ScreenFlow is a wonderful application, allowing you to record the screen (with audio and video) and then edit the recording, add effects to later export it. This is essentially the entire workflow for simpler screencasts and for precisely that reason, I use the app when making the Appthroughs here on the site. Everything is done within ScreenFlow, from the text, to the animations and of course the raw recording. It’s simple, stylish and fast!
Developer: Telestream
Requirements: Mac OS X 10.5 or later
Price: $99
About Erik Bernskiold
Erik is the owner of the Bernskiold Media Group and is a Web Designer, Photographer and Software-Trainer. He is interested in all aspects of graphic design and media production as well as gadgets and technology.
Learn about the new features in Aperture 3 by watching our full Appthough on it where we have a look at Faces, Places, Adjustment Presets and Brushes, all new in Aperture 3.
But how to do you actually do it in Screenflow? Thanks!