Filed under: Video, How-tos, Productivity, Tips and tricks
Making Screencasts
Don McAllister over at ScreenCastsOnline points to this great tutorial for making screencasts on your Mac. Miraz Jordan has a bunch of suggestions for setting up and recording a screencast bringing together a number of tools like Backdrop, Mouseposé , iShowU, and Snapz Pro X, all of which we have mentioned at one time or another. Rather coincidentally I also ran across (via Cocoablogs) this discussion by Peter Hosey of optimizing iShowU for screencasts, but the comments there suggest that Snapz Pro X is able to capture at a higher resolution than iShowU (with the trade off being the time it takes to save the movie when you're finished recording). Unfortunately, though it works with Intel Macs, Snapz Pro X is not universal (unlike the less expensive iShowU). So TUAWers, share your own experiences: what have you found that works particularly well for screencasting? And if you don't have any experience yet, but would like to get some, check out Miraz Jordan's tutorial to learn how to get started.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
fitzage said 9:07PM on 3-15-2007
On my MacBook Pro, Snapz Pro hands down. iShow U had serious performance issues when trying to capture full screen vids.
Once Snapz Pro becomes universal, maybe it will export faster. That's the only downside I've come across.
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Tom said 12:45AM on 3-16-2007
I used Snapz Pro X to make movies of lecture demonstrations all last semester, and found it to be very reliable.
In a typical class I would talk for a while, then show something on the screen, then talk for a while, etc. I had first tried running on my 1.33GHz G4 laptop, but found that the post-recording processing time was too slow -- I'd be ready to do my next demo, but Snapz would still be saving the last one. When I moved to doing my demos on an Intel iMac, things went much smoother -- even a long demo would get encoded quickly.
My big performance hint is to drop the frame rate waaaay down. I typically recorded at 1-2 frames/second. I found that was just fine for most demos -- I don't move the mouse that much, that quickly. This saves significantly on your file size, too.
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Zeno Davatz said 3:17AM on 3-16-2007
SnapzProX works perfect for me on my Intel iMac together with the iMovie HD of Apple it is very sweet. I tried Final Cut Pro as well but that tool is not usable to me! I find iMovie HD a lot better, specially for editing the titles and the crossfading.
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Hagen Kaye said 4:44AM on 3-16-2007
We used iShowU, MousePosé and iMovie to create our screencast tutorials.
These screencast tutorials were done on an Intel iMac. Can't comment on full screen responsiveness like the others, but the iShowU + MousePosé combo worked very well for us.
Screencasts were brought into iMovie HD at 640 x 480 resolution and were edited. Editing was the biggest part of the screencast - it was easier to (at least for me) capture the screencasts and then dub in the audio afterwards.
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Gand said 6:02AM on 3-16-2007
A lot of screencast applications are missing for Mac OS X like Camtasia, Macromedia Captivate/Robodemo or Qarbon. Is also missing a Mac version of freeware Wink that make flash movie instead of .mov. You can use freesoftware wnc2swf, but nobody compiled a osx version of Xvidcap.
Have also a look to great mac screencast made by http://murphymac.com/
Links:
http://www.debugmode.com/wink/
http://xvidcap.sourceforge.net/
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jason said 11:37AM on 3-16-2007
When I tried out the demo on iShowU, the video was much brighter than my screen. anyone else noticed this?
is there anyway to get rid of this? to darken the video, maybe it is using a default colorspace opposed to my calibrated monitors profile?
what about snapz, can it do this?
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42 said 12:10PM on 3-16-2007
iShowU kicks Snapz's butt. The movies are ready immediately without any lengthly encoding and I like the recording guide wires you can set to define the capture area. I'll be buying this one and Omnidazzle for the training vids I need to make of Windows apps (in Parallels!).
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Peter Hosey said 3:48AM on 3-17-2007
jason: H.264 is like that. See my “Screencast codec showdown”:
http://boredzo.org/codec-comparison
Use a lossless codec like Animation for recording, like I mention in the blog post and in the Showdown. H.264 is great for file-size, but its biggest downside is that your colors get washed out. Fortunately, that's an acceptable trade-off 99% of the time. (The Showdown harps on the heavy artifacting H.264 brought, but it's really not that bad most of the time. I need to rewrite the conclusion to reflect that.)
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