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?
- What format does the video need to be in? .mov .wmv .mpeg .swf .flv?
- What do you intend to capture?
- What quality does it need to be?
