Looking for free video screen capture software for mac I found there to be a great abundance… of nothing. There isn’t a single free pice of screen capture software that doesn’t have water marks or limited options unless you pay for it.
With this in mind I wanted to make sure if I had to pay it was worth it. Out of all the different screen capturing software I’ve seen ScreenFlow seems to be the best. It has a wide appeal to novice users and experts alike.
ScreenFlow has two stages, the capture stage and the edit stage. Capturing is very simple and not very customizable, it just does it. Where ScreenFlow comes into its own is with the edit. See ScreenFlow captures everything by default and then you can do what you want with it. You can’t capture just one window, but you can highlight any window and fade or blur out the background. You can’t select a specific area to record but you can zoom to any section you like in the editor.
It seems like they have thought through all the nifty little things that you might want to do with a screen capture and added them in easy steps. You can add little click effects, you can zoom into the mouse pointer, add text where ever you want as well as many other features that make your videos look more professional.
Now, though limited the capture stage is very important. You are presented with 4 options:
Record desktop from (I discovered this when I plugged in my second monitor, you can select which you want to record
Record video from (lets you record from your built in iSight or external video source)
Record audio from (select the audio source to record complete with VDU)
Record computer audio (If you want to record sounds from the computer, e.g. application sounds, games sounds).
This is all you need to set up ScreenFlow and then hit record and everything is taken care of.
The last and possibly most important part of any screen capture software is the export. With out good export features it doesn’t matter how good it captures and how shiny it looks you can’t do anything with it, it’s useless! ScreenFlow is very simple, you can select one of the presets which include web ready formats, iPhone, iPod, Windows Media as well as high quality formats such as PAL DV and NTSC DV. There are also options to customize your preset, so you can select your own compression techniques as you would in say Premier Pro.
ScreenFlow really is ideal for video screen capture, wether your a beginner or a pro. What ever is on your screen it will capture, video, games, sounds, it will even record your webcam and put it in a little box on your screen for you.
The one thing I would suggest as will all video screen capture software you need your own microphone. A head set mic will do the trick, but don’t use an internally build microphone as they tend to pick up lots of noise from your computer.
So while I was making my “How to strip audio from video” tutorial I came across the need for some video screen capture software. I don’t know why but I was expecting to be able to find some free software as I know that there is free screen capture software available for PC. I assumed this would be the case for Mac also. I discovered in all of my search that there is no free screen capture software for Mac! Shock horror! In disbelief I trudged through many reviews of screen capture software looking for one that was free but the only notion of free software I found was a complicated utility that could only capture the screen and not the audio, looked very messy and seemed overly difficult to use. Now this is not to say that the software does not exist, I found some fantastic looking software that you have to pay for but at the same time it’s hard to stump up the cash for software you know nothing about even if you read a review.
All of the trial or “free” versions I found were water marked or limited in some way. This was ever so annoying. The pay for software ranged in price considerably too, starting at around $25 up to $100-$200. So what’s the difference? Is the $150 software any better? You kind of hope it would be but there doesn’t seem to be much difference.
I have decided that this week I am going to concentrate on this problem and maybe help someone else out there find some software.
Some things to think about when choosing screen capture software are:
Do you want full screen video capture?
Do you want to capture only a specific window or area of the screen?
Do you want to capture audio at the same time?
Do you have anyway to edit it or does it need to have an editor with it?
Do you want to zoom, annotate, highlight aspects of your capture and how will you do that?
“MPEG (pronounced M-peg), which stands for Moving Picture Experts Group, is the name of a family of standards used for coding audio-visual information (e.g., movies, video, music) in a digital compressed format.
The major advantage of MPEG compared to other video and audio coding formats is that MPEG files are much smaller for the same quality. This is because MPEG uses very sophisticated compression techniques.”
-www.mpeg.org
Today I have made a quick tutorial on how to strip audio from a video file using Quicktime Pro. I know most major video editing software will do this for you but some people don’t have that. Everybody has Quicktime, and the upgrade to Quicktime Pro isn’t that expensive, I upgraded because of advice from a lecturer at university who suggested Quicktime Pro as a cut down video editing suit.
Remember, all video on a Mac is based on Quicktime anyway, even if your using Premier Pro it will just be a fancy front end for Quicktime!
I found this blog post on another website about different places you can upload video. Its a great idea to uplaod your videos to different sites to get the word spread around about your videos. But some places are probably more appropriate than others so you want to assess for yourself if you think it’s worth uploading your videos there. It is defiantly worth having a presence on all the big sites like YouTube, MetaCafe, etc because you want people to be able to find your videos. But it’s also a good idea to work on your presence on the smaller site that have more independent focus as the esteem you create there may be more valued in the long run.
Some of these sites even let you make money from your videos! How cool is that! They split the advertising revenue they make form your video pages with you, some even up to 50%!
