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Summary: ScreenFlow is a quality screencasting and video editing app for Mac.It captures your actions on desktop screen, and then you can edit the recordings by trimming and rearranging the content as well as by adding callouts, annotations, and motion.
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If you’re in the business of creating screencasts or Mac-based video demos, there’s a very good chance that you’re already using Telestream’s $99 ScreenFlow. With the latest update, the app is sure to gain a new group of supporters—iOS developers. And it will because Apple is encouraging these developers to submit app previews—video captures of their apps in action. It happens that this latest version of ScreenFlow not only lets you capture video directly to a Mac running Yosemite from an iOS 8 device that bears a Lightning-connector, but also lets you add touch callouts—overlays that mimic finger taps and swipes.
Like every version of ScreenFlow I’ve ever used, it exhibits quirky behavior from time to time, but the app’s benefits vastly outweigh its quirks.
- You may be searching for a free and reliable screencasting tool for your Windows or Mac computer to record screen activity. If so, you are in the right place. Here we will show you two best screen recorders for Windows and Mac to record screen videos with audio.
- Jing (Windows/Mac, Basic: Free, Pro: $14.95 per year) Taranfx’s Recommended Jing is the more compact cousin of Camtasia Studio (see below) and great for less complicated—and more economical!—screencasting.
- Mac OS X is full of ways to record your screen, with a tool built-in to Quicktime Player and a vast number of third-party apps. Among the many tools, Screenflow is easily our top choice.
What it is
If this is the first you’ve heard of ScreenFlow, here’s the lowdown. ScreenFlow is both a motion-capture tool as well as a video editor. Unlike some other capture utilities, it doesn’t allow you to capture just a portion of your screen—it’s all or nothing. When you wish to show just a bit of the screen you turn to its editing tools once you’ve completed your capture. They allow you to zoom in and out on the screen as well as add callouts, titles, annotations, transitions, and video and audio actions.
ScreenFlow is not a Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere replacement. Although you can edit video very easily once you get the hang of the workflow, it doesn’t offer much in the way of video effects and its titling functions aren’t terribly advanced. While you can use it to edit camera footage (and I often do), it really shines when working with the kind of material you’d use in a screencast.
With that under your belt, let’s examine its new features.
Making movies from mobile
With iOS 8 and Mac OS X Yosemite, Apple introduced the ability to capture video and audio from a connected Lightning-bearing iOS device. (In the past, you’d accomplish this via an app that managed the job through AirPlay, which, while workable, didn’t produce video as crisp as the new method.) Telestream has taken advantage of this feature and rolled it into ScreenFlow 5.
Now, when you attach a recent model iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad to your Yosemite-running Mac via a Lightning cable, that device becomes a capture source, right along with your Mac’s screen and compatible cameras. As it captures the device’s video, ScreenFlow automatically grabs any audio it plays as well. You won’t see a preview of your device on your Mac’s screen, however. You’ll operate it as you normally would, interacting with the device’s screen.
You’re welcome to combine multiple input sources. For example, you could choose to capture your iPad, your Mac’s display, narration from a connected microphone, the audio your Mac plays, and video from your Mac’s FaceTime camera or compatible webcam. Most sources are added as separate tracks. Select a video track and you can move and resize its contents in ScreenFlow’s preview window. For example, you might want to move the video captured by your webcam to the top-right corner and make it smaller, place your Mac’s screen capture on the left side of the frame, and scale the iPad’s video so it takes up most of the frame’s right side and slightly overlaps your Mac’s screen.
When capturing audio played by my Mac I ran into one significant problem. While the Mac’s audio was captured perfectly as long as I chose the computer’s internal speakers or connected Thunderbolt display as an output destination in the Sound system preference, if I instead chose a USB-connected destination such as my audio interface, the Mac’s sound was distorted and delayed. Telestream is aware of the issue and is working on a fix.
Enhancing the mobile experience
The ability to capture high-quality video from your iOS device is welcome, but just as useful is the option to then add callouts so that viewers have some notion of where you’ve tapped and swiped. This feature is called Touch Callouts in ScreenFlow 5 and works this way:
Select the video track captured from your iOS device, drag the playhead to the position in the timeline where you’d like to add the callout, and choose Actions > Add Touch Callout. A gray dot appears on the screen that you can drag to a new position. A yellow Touch Callout action is added to the track and the Touch Callout pane appears on the right side of the ScreenFlow window. Within this pane you can choose the number of dots that you’d like to appear, their size, spacing, color, and opacity. You can also create an animation so that the dot moves from one place to another—something you’d do to illustrate a drag or swipe.
Adding these callouts would be tedious if not for the fact that ScreenFlow 5 also adds templated actions. This lets you create actions and then save them. For example, you could create and then save a Touch Callout action that illustrates a swipe down. You can later choose that action from the Templates entry in the Actions menu and it will be added to your project, complete with associated animation. Telestream has kindly added a collection of preconfigured Touch Callout actions including Single Tap, Swipe Left, Swipe Right, Zoom In, Zoom out, Four Finger Swipe Left, and Four Finger Swipe Right.
My one complaint about the feature is that the callout dots are constrained to a line. That means that I can’t illustrate a four-finger pinch-to-Home-screen gesture as I can’t put four dots on screen in a four-cornered arrangement.
Making editing easier
If you’ve spend enough time with ScreenFlow you’re accustomed to those “There’s got to be an easier way to do this” moments. For example, you’ve added a video action that zooms in on a particular portion of the screen. Undoing it requires that you add another video action and then reverse the settings from the previous one—zoom out to 100 percent, for instance.
ScreenFlow 5 offers a new feature called Snapback Action that, when implemented, adds an action of the same length that undoes the previous action. Using my example, I’d add my zoom action and then, when I want to return to full screen, choose Actions > Add Snapback Action > Video. An “undo-what-you-just-did” action is added to the timeline and ends at the current playhead position.
Another time-saver is a the Recording Monitor. Select it from the ScreenFlow menu and you see a preview of what your webcam is capturing along with meters that reflect your audio input gain. This is particularly helpful when you’re using a webcam for a picture-in-picture effect. Far too often you’ve performed your capture and, on playback, discovered that your face is positioned incorrectly or your microphone gain was set too low. Being able to preview each is helpful. If you have two monitors you can keep this preview window open, but “off camera” on the second monitor. If, instead, you leave it on your primary monitor, it will be captured along with everything else on the screen.
ScreenFlow 5 also lets you insert markers—both during recording and as you edit. To do the former you need to set up a hotkey that you can press when you want to mark a point in your capture—perhaps when you want to later remind yourself that you’d like to cut your clip at this point or add an action. This is yet another time saver that allows you to spend less time scrolling through your timeline to find just the perfect edit point.
Finally, ScreenFlow 5 has incorporated Apple media browser. If you wish to insert an image from your iPhoto library or a track from iTunes, you can now easily do it.
Export duties
ScreenFlow 5 also introduces a couple of new export features. As I mentioned earlier, ScreenFlow now lets you capture video and audio directly from an iOS device. This makes it possible for iOS developers to create preview movies that they can post at the App Store. Making that job just a bit easier is the new iOS App Preview export setting. Choose it and your movie will be converted using the ProRes 422HQ encoder.
In addition, the latest version includes a Batch Export feature that allows you to queue up multiple ScreenFlow documents and export them using the same export preset.
If you’ve used ScreenFlow in the past and are accustomed to tweaking its export settings you’ll find that they’re now more limited. To make ScreenFlow 5 available on the Mac App Store, Telestream had to remove any QuickTime export options, as QuickTime has been deprecated by Apple in favor of AV Foundation. QuickTime APIs can no longer be used when submitting apps to the App Store, thus the change. In practice, this means that when you choose the Lossless – ProRes with Alpha preset, your only encoder options are ProRes 422 HQ and ProRes 4444.
The bottom line
I’ve been producing screencasts for a long time and spent a number of years doing so with iMovie. I switched to ScreenFlow around the turn of the decade and can’t imagine switching back, particularly now that ScreenFlow 5 supports direct recording from some iOS devices and lets me add callouts to make my actions clearer to the viewer. As you’ve read, I have a couple of quibbles but they pale in comparison to the benefits this app provides. If you’re producing screencasts on your Mac and not using ScreenFlow, it’s high time you did.
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Mac OS X is full of ways to record your screen, with a tool built-in to Quicktime Player and a vast number of third-party apps. Among the many tools, Screenflow is easily our top choice. It's fast, feature-rich, handles everything about the screencasting process from start to finish, and doubles as possibly the best simple video editing application on the Mac.
Screenflow
Platform: Mac OS X
Price: $100
Download Page
Price: $100
Download Page
Features
- Record from your computer screen, a video camera, microphone and computer's audio all at the same time
- Excellent built-in editor that can also double as a phenomenal video editor.
- The editor allows you to add callouts, shapes, text overlays, and perform simple motion effects very easily.
- Publish directly to YouTube or Vimeo, or export to an all-in-one Flash video presentation
- Mac OS X Lion users can take advantage of several features like resume, auto saving, document versioning, and full screen mode.
- Export screencasts to multiple settings and save your own presets.
- Several built-in audio functions, such as a limiter and easy conversion to mono.
This is just a condensed version of ScreenFlow's features. It is a very powerful, very feature-rich application. You can see the longer list here.
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Where It Excels
ScreenFlow is a phenomenal application. It handles the screencasting workflow from start to finish. You can record your screen, yourself, your audio, and your computer's audio all at the same time. Then you can edit what you just recorded in ScreenFlow's built-in editor. From there you can add text overlays, video annotations, motion effects, focus a spotlight on the mouse's position, and a lot more. When you're finished with your recording, you can send it directly to YouTube or Vimeo, export to an embeddable Flash player for your web site, or export the video file to a number of other formats. It just takes care of absolutely everything you could need to do with a screencast.
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But beyond screencasting, it's actually a very functional video editor. In the latest version of ScreenFlow, you can actually create a blank document and just throw a bunch of video files into it for editing purposes. Now that iMovie has its strange interface and isn't terribly easy to use, ScreenFlow is a great alternative for simple editing projects. It has a few built-in motion controls, plenty of transitions, and you can just drag the video you want to edit right onto the timeline. If Quicktime can open the video file, ScreenFlow can edit it. And ScreenFlow won't need to convert it to another format. It'll just play the video as-is. Sometimes it can get a little choppy if the video requires a bit of work to decode, but I use it to edit 1080p H.264 video on a MacBook Air and it handles things just fine.
What makes ScreenFlow so amazing is that it does everything and yet somehow doesn't feel like any of its abilities are superfluous. It's really an incredible app that's worth every cent if you do a lot of screencasting—and especially if you want a great little video editor as an added bonus.
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Where It Falls Short
ScreenFlow is probably the most expensive screencasting application you can buy, coming in at $100. When we started putting together regular screencasts for Lifehacker, we avoided ScreenFlow because of the cost. After trying it out, however, it was clear that it was worth the money. That said, it isn't without its flaws. When Mac OS X Lion was nearing release, ScreenFlow was particularly buggy. When version 3 was released, it also came with several issues as well. Currently the app is very stable, but sometimes updates bring more problems than they fix.
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Additionally, there are just a few quirks in the user interface that become annoying at times. For example, when you drag the clip at the end of the editing timeline to the left, the entire timeline shrinks while you do so making it difficult to drag accurately. There are a handful of issues like that. None are deal breakers, but are definitely annoying when you use the app often.
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Although ScreenFlow allows you to set defaults for video transitions and a couple of other things, you can't set defaults for everything you do. For example, you can't set a default font and style for text overlays. But like every other problem with the app, it's not a lack of functionality. ScreenFlow's issues all reside in little quirks and annoyances that you can expect from any app with so many capabilities. You'll find similar problems in any video editing software. While these quirks can get annoying and you might wonder why they left an option or two out, they're all tiny problems.
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The Competition
Quicktime Player—the version included with Mac OS X 10.6 and 10.7—offers screen recording features. They're very limited, but if you need to create a screencast and you don't want to pay for anything you've already got an option built-in. It saves file in H.264 format so your screencasts are immediately ready to upload to video sharing sites or can be shared as-is. The video quality isn't great and you don't have much control over the recording itself, but it's definitely sufficient for casual screencasters.
Best Screencasting Software For Mac
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Screenflick ($29) is a simple but solid option that pays attention to more than just recording the screen. It'll watch for key and mouse presses, too. You can also record computer audio, watermark your recordings, and pause if you need to take a break. It also offers phenomenal export settings, allowing you to choose simple presets or make your own and export to multiple sources in one sweep. It's basically like ScreenFlow without the editor and a better set of video export controls.
Jing (Free or $15/year for Premium) is a screenshot and screencasting tool with a focus on social media. The idea is to simply capture what you see and share it on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and others. It is designed to be quick and simple, rather than feature-rich. If those things are important to you, Jing is worth a look.
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Itool For Mac
iShowU HD ($50-$70) is a simple but powerful screencasting tool. It records its screencasts in an easily-shareable format so you're ready to upload to YouTube or send the screencast via email as soon as you're done. It integrates with pro apps like Final Cut Studio and boasts plenty of optimizations to handle everything it does very quickly. It's definitely a good screencasting app, but we thinking the competition offers either an advantage on price or an advantage on features.
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Got another favorite screencasting app we didn't mention? Share it in the comments!
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