Posted onDavidbyJanuary 22nd, 2009 with Comments Off
Why is a photographer doing a review of screencast software? Because in order to do video tutorials for things like Photoshop I will need screencast software and when I did my research and testing to decide which software I would choose I found that there are huge differences in many of them and when I found ScreenFlow I knew I had found my pick.
I tried no less than half a dozen applications and all of them had their benefits. Some were free, some were not. Some were simple, some were not. Some exported to multiple formats (Quicktime, Flash, etc), some did not. All but one lacked the feature I was looking for, which was the ability to edit the video, and that one was ScreenFlow.
Most screencast applications have you start by selecting which part of the screen you wish to capture; full screen, a single window, or a user defined selection. They also have you select choices like having keystrokes display in the video or having cursor animations on mouse clicks. Some didn’t even have these features. Once you were done with the capture you were done. None of the choices could be changed later.
With ScreenFlow you don’t select anything prior to the capture. It records full screen and everything you do with the cursor and keyboard. When you are done recording you get an edit window that looks something like Garage Band and iMovie combined. You can then decide if you want the cursor animation and/or keystrokes. You can crop the video to any part of the screen for the entire video, or you can show different parts of the screen at different times with video actions, which are very simple to apply.
Finally, an application that gave me the ability to really put together a helpful screencast. In fact, not only was ScreenFlow the best screencast application I found for Mac, it was the only one that would let me build the videos I wanted to build. While it was not one of the free ones, it is worth the money.
Admin Note: The original version of this post was lost in a database accident. This is a new review.
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