ScreenFlow

By: Erik Vlietinck - Last Updated: Thu 05 June 2008

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Complete solution for capturing and editing screens to video, complete with video-taped narration capabilities.

“A picture is worth a thousand words.” What would a motion picture be worth then? It depends. If you’re a “sender” trying to explain something to a “receiver” who is supposed to learn something in the process, a motion picture that shows you in real-time what you should do is probably worth a lot more than you can charge for it. Screenshot video captures fall in that category. I can write about a complex product and you’ll probably more or less understand what I’m saying, but if I can show you that same product and how it works, you’ll grasp a lot more.

In a cross-media publishing world, video captures of computer screens instantly convey whatever message you are trying to get across. A software review becomes lively, showing you the clumsy or splendid ways the application works—all without you having to install the software and risking a crashing computer system or data loss.

When publishing a magazine online, screenshot videos help to make the content more exciting as well as more useful and easier to understand. We have had a utility that supports screenshot video capture for years: Snapz Pro by Ambrosia Software. Unfortunately, the video screen capture module of Snapz Pro was less than ideal. On my Power Mac G5 with dual 1.8GHz processors, the video screen capture of Snapz Pro was not exactly rock-solid.

Screen Video Capturing Before ScreenFlow

When it did work, it was slow, tied up the whole Mac and made the program that you captured the video from, slow as molasses—even when you set Snapz Pro to record only a tiny portion of the screen in “mouse cursor follow mode”. We were led to believe this was the only way to capture a live screen as video capturing put such high demands on our machines, we needed at least an Intel Mac to comfortably record even the smallest portion of our screen.

I therefore laughed in disdain when I read the ScreenFlow web page that said the application doesn’t need to record only small portions of your screen. In fact, I dared Vara Software by asking them for a test license. And I was convinced, even absolutely certain that ScreenFlow would choke on the vast amounts of data video capturing entails. When I received the license, I couldn’t wait any longer to prove the developers wrong, and so I decided to capture my mouse moving from screen corner to corner.

And what I saw was simply astonishing. There was no delay, not even as much as a millisecond of my cursor getting stuck because the CPUs couldn’t follow. The whole 1600 x 1200 pixels worth of video capture space were smoothly recorded. In later tests, ScreenFlow proved to be capable of recording hours of screen video on end without delays, crashes, hangs, or third-party applications freezing on me.

This proved to be true with microphone sound enabled, and finally also with microphone and system sound enabled. The only thing that took ScreenFlow the best part of an hour was the encoding phase, when I decided to encode my one hour video of a screen to one of the many QuickTime formats the application exports to.

Screen Video Capturing the ScreenFlow Way

And ScreenFlow does more: it also is a complete post-production editing environment, specifically tailored to videos made of a computer screen. I don’t particularly like that feature set, but only because it makes my license of Mousepose 3 obsolete.

But let’s go back to ScreenFlow and start at the beginning. ScreenFlow, when started, presents itself to the user as a HUD-like dialogue window where you can select the monitor to record from on a multi-monitor system, whether you want to record your own voice (microphone—you could also record the birds outside), and if you want to additionally record system sounds made by your Mac. The latter requires you to install a driver.

As soon as you’ve set everything up the way you want, you can start recording your screen video. ScreenFlow gives you another 5 seconds (you can set that to more or less in the Preferences) to prepare yourself and a final warning that you can end the recording using a shortcut key that you can define yourself.

When the count-down disappears, you can start doing whatever it is you wanted to do in the first place. There are no walking ants delimiting a tiny portion of your screen following your cursor to make sure the CPUs don’t get over-heated. Instead, the whole screen is recorded. It’s amazing to see that even on a large screen like mine this does not slow down or gets in the way of anything else you are doing—not without sound, and not with sound.

Screen Capturing With ScreenFlow

The reason, according to the developer’s web site, is that ScreenFlow only records those parts of your screen that change at recording time. You could compare ScreenFlow to a digital recording, while Snapz Pro’s method is more like an analogue recording (digital video also only records what changes in the scene during recording).

Whatever the case, the quality of the video capture is as good as the live screen. When you’re done recording, you hit the shortcut key combination and ScreenFlow will now present you with its editing window. Below the preview window where your screen capture is shown, a timeline fills up with video and audio tracks. At the right hand side is an Inspector area where you can edit the captured screen with additional effects.

Now this is the first phase in the screen capturing process the way ScreenFlow handles it, where you start seeing that this is a truly professional tool for online publishers, CD/DVD training publishers, etc. Not only can you edit the tracks, you can also add an additional screen capture. When you do, the new screen capture is added with its own tracks. Once you’ve recorded all screens you want, it’s time to start editing with ScreenFlow—soon enough, you’ll see what you can do with additional recordings.

The main window of ScreenFlow has a crop button, which you use to crop the capture area just as you would crop an image in Aperture or Photoshop. The Inspector shows five tabs: Video properties, Audio Properties, Screen Recording Properties, Callout Action, and Media in your Document.

The main recording—the one you created first or the one you drag from the Media tab into the main window and set as the main recording later—is the ScreenFlow document. The document can be altered and edited as if you were working with an image editor, meaning it’s as simple as baking a cake.

No More Need For Mousepose

For example, Video properties allows you to scale, rotate and add a reflection and shadow effect to the recording in the main window. When nothing is selected, these features are greyed out. In order to activate them, all you have to do is select the recording in the main preview window or the timeline. The Scale property is important, especially when you’ve recorded multiple screen captures.

By scaling short screen captures that clarify (for example) details of a process on-screen, you can create picture-in-picture effects, where the main video shows a global event, while the smaller captures show details. The video recording can also be rotated and its opacity can be changed. These features belong—in my opinion—in the domain of design and looks.

Audio Properties are limited to muting and changing the volume. The Screen Recording Properties Inspector lets you chose whether the mouse pointer must be shown, whether a “radar” click effect and/or sound must be added, and whether keys that you pressed on the keyboard must be shown—exactly those features that I have come to love and cherish in Mousepose.

Export Your Screenshot Video Like a Pro

The Show Keys pressed has one glitch—Mousepose isn’t useless now, nevertheless—and that is speed: it can’t follow your keystrokes if you type too fast. The screen capture that I made will show you what I mean—I wasn’t typing only half of the characters there!

With regards to Callout Actions, ScreenFlow has a major advantage over Mousepose: it allows you to not only dim the screen and highlight what’s under the cursor, but also to zoom the cursor area and give it an outline. You can even feather the effect and set a limited duration for it.

Where ScreenFlow also shows its professionalism is in Export capabilities. You get a number of presets to export to, but you can customise those presets any way you would like. I tried epxorting a screen capture to Uncompressed video and import that into Final Cut Pro, just to see how it would work, and it worked like a charm. In Final Cut Pro, the video track and audio track were separated—just as with a real “live” camcorder recording, and the quality of the video was as perfect as in ScreenFlow itself.

The Export dialogue further gives you the option of scaling your video capture, and of using Motion Blur. The latter should improve the quality of video actions, but my own experience showed that Motion Blur also blurred the background—the screen video itself—and that made overall quality worse. Some export formats also support chapter tracks made from the markers that you can add in the ScreenFlow Timeline.

Last but certainly not least: you can add camera video to your screen capture, turning ScreenFlow in a complete solution for video trainings or video reviews.

With ScreenFlow, Vara Software has developed professional screen video capture software. ScreenFlow’s lickable interface hides a complex algorithm that puts the user in the drivers’ seat without requiring you to buy the most powerful Intel Mac available. The most amazing to me is that ScreenFlow works smoothly on a machine that is ready for replacement, and which by all standards certainly isn’t state-of-the-art anymore.

Publishers who migrate from print to online will love ScreenFlow’s ease-of-use, flexibility and export capabilities that allow them to either finish a project in-house, or hand it off to a professional video-editing firm. Online trainers will like the same qualities in addition to the Callout Actions capabilities that make other software superfluous. Finally, online publishers like myself additionally love the speed with which you can get from nothing to a finished product.