5. Copernicus
This is a very neat application I found on my hunt for free software. It’s small and compact, runs in the background and becomes active when you call it up with a set key function. Now at first this annoyed me because the default key setting was already in use by my Mac, it’s the play/pause button, but it is very easy to change this to something more useful. It is primarily a screen shot application and allows you to capture the whole screen or an area but it is capable of recording video.

Though having said that it doesn’t not have the ability to record sound which rules it out for some people. The file size of recording to RAM seems to be very high and the option to record to Hard Disk seems to make a smaller file size but the frame rate is reduced significantly making videos seem a little jerky.

It depends what you want from a screen capture but Copernicus is a good place to start specially as it’s completely free. There is no branding over the output and no trail restrictions, just good old fashioned shareware!

Official Website

4.Screenium
This is a very nice video screen capture software I found on the Apple website. It’s very simple to use, in some ways too simple, I ended up recording a screen capture with out realizing what I was doing first try! But once I’d figured out what all the buttons do I was away capturing screen videos all over the place! With Screenium you are presented with the application panel which holds all the settings. You can select which screen you want to capture, what audio you want to capture and even do the web cam with in the capture feature which is really cool! You can apply mouse effects which is pretty neat and “hot text” which allows you to add text to your video during the capture! Just hit the appropriately mapped hot key and your text will appear in the location you selected. Fantastic!… Well kinda not. It’s ok If you have everything planned out and just need to annotate a couple things but it wont make you titles and unless you know exactly how long the recording is you can’t have the text appear the whole capture.

It’s a nice video capturing tool but some of the features need a bit more thought. Also Screenium costs for the full version so you might want to think about other software before you dive right in.

Official Website

3.Jing
Now jing is a “Free” piece of video screen capture software. Well It says it is free and if you don’t mind the Jing logos on the end of your video and don’t mind only exporting in .swf file format that’s fine. Unfortunately this may not be what you want. Jing looked so promising when I finally found a “Free” piece of screen capture software but then my heart sank when I realized the inbuilt flaws in the free side. Of course these can be rectified easily buy paying for it which will remove the logoing and let you export in .mov format but that’s NOT free like it said it was ¬¬

That said it is still a very nice piece of software! Once run Jing will appear as a “sun” in the corner of your screen, this sun has 3 points which you use to access Jings features. The recording selection is very flexible and easy to use so you can select exactly what you want to record. You also have the ability to publish directly to YouTube or one of the other video sites at the click of a button. If you are just looking to capture a video for yourself and your friends to put on YouTube and don’t mind the logoing and don’t want to edit it much Jing could be the way for you! Though if advertising other peoples software on your videos isn’t your thing *cough* then maybe it’s not the way for you.

Official Website

2.iShowU
iShowU is a very clear useful piece of software. I particular like the viewer where you can see the desktop you are capturing. Though with desktop capture you expect that to be obvious but I think it’s a neat little feature that it shows this real time. I also like the multiple desktop feature that lets you slide from one desktop to the other in the video. It’s a well presented screen capture utility that lets you capture video how you want. You can select the size/area you wish to record, the video output you want to export as and a few other features like being able to show keys pressed and having mouse effects.

iShowU also has a HD counter part which means you can capture in very high quality! This is going to be more for the corporate market, maybe if you are making a DVD or something where you need to show off a bit. Though It is still a very easy to use piece of software that makes excellent quality videos for any output.

Official Website

1. ScreenFlow
I still Like screen flow for it’s simplicity and ease of use. The fact the whole screen capture process from capture to export is kept in one neat little package saves so much time. There’s no messing about with file formats so your screen capture is the same format as your editor, there’s no worrying about loss of quality due to compression the video more than once. They have taken video screen capture just one step further and created a piece of software that does it all.

ScreenFlow is the only screen capture software I’ve found yet that contains an editor as well. The editor is where ScreenFlow excels, making it unique compared to other screen capture software. That’s why ScreenFlow is my software of choice when it comes to needing screen capture software.
Official website

Also see…
My ScreenFlow Review
My ScreenFlow tutorial

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.

ScreenFlow Website:  www.telestream.net

Example: Video tutorial made with ScreenFlow

How to Strip audio from video

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?