Creating Screencasts with Screenflow

Posted on: 23 Oct 2010

Categories: Screencasting, Marketing, and Macintosh Applications

Today I want to share with you a really nice Mac application for creating screecasts. If you are not familiar with screencasts, the basic idea is that they are recordings of your screen, but really, they are much more than that these days. It is possible to integrate almost any media into a screencast if your software will allow it. For example, using Screenflow you can integrate audio (from a variety of sources including your computer’s mic or input or even route audio from your Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) using third party routing software like SoundFlower or the much more stable and easy to use WireTap Anywhere), your computer’s video camera input, graphics, text, effects, and a bunch more.

There are several screencasting software products on the market even some basic ones that are free. I started with a few of those and they can be fine for simple, non-professional-quality short movies where you don’t intend to do any real editing. But, I was in the market for a pro-level solution to produce high quality screencasts. I am still working out the details of my more advanced setup which will probably integrate with my Pro Tools audio setup, but even right out of the box I was making some nice screencasts with just Screenflow and my laptop’s built-in mic. I demo’d all the usual cast of competing products along the way and found that I really like Screenflow the best by a long shot. I’ll give you a quick tour and give you a feel for what I think are its comparative strengths.

Screenflow starts up quickly and presents the following dialog window to make a few quick choices about what the software is going to record, both with regard to video and audio.

This dialog window points out a couple advantages of Screenflow. First, is the fact that you can integrate the input of your built-in iSight camera with the screen capture. This is nice if for instance you want to integrate a smaller inset window of yourself hosting the screencast which can provide a more intimate experience with the viewer. Second, as you can see from the screenshot below, you have quite a few choices for routing audio:

Most people will probably just slap a USB mic on their laptop and go with that, but, as I mentioned in the intro, the ability to integrate audio from external DAW systems is an important feature if you want to do the best quality voice over and music integration work. In fact, if you want to see how to integrate Cubase, for instance, I recommend visiting this blog entry and video detailing how this is achieved with Wiretap Anywhere. This is the kind of stuff that I want to be able to do with screencasting software, not just the simple stuff.

Screenflow is a very usable piece of software. You aren’t going to find yourself needing to read the manual much, if any, to use it. The way I got started was to follow the very brief tutorial it ships with that is accessible from the Help menu. The thing I like about the tutorial is that it follows a quickly paced learn by doing approach with an example screencast that launches from the tutorial Help menu (nice touch). This is a good example of drinking your own koolaid and show don’t tell. Starting off with this tutorial had me up and running in minutes with some pretty advanced recording and editing capabilities right off the bat.

By design, Screenflow does not litter your desktop with a control window or UI when recording. I really like this, but it does mean that you need to remember how to stop (and start) the software: CMD-Shift-2.

I also like how much editing power is baked right into Screenflow. I am not in the market to lay down $1,300 on Final Cut Pro or to climb its learning curve just yet. And that is fine because the editing capabilities of Screenflow, which actually replace a lot of what you would need a separate editing software program for, will allow you to remove mistakes and quickly piece together a polished end product. These same powerful edting features are going to be important for another conceptual and practical reason that I would like to discuss.

Many pro screencasters approach screencast production a lot like software developers approach software development: divide and conquer. Technologies and tools partly facilitate this. We want to build up our screencast in quick iterations and build things up in an orthogonal and decoupled way (being redundant here, forgive me). The same is true with Screenflow, in that, instead of approaching a screencast production as an intimidating monolithic uninterrupted performance, within which one mistake, or bug, if we want to continue the analogy, causes you significant pain or “rewrite”, you approach the screencast in pieces. Say, you are starting the screencast without a totally clear idea of what the end product is going to be (sounds familiarly Agile). No big deal, record your scratch take of the intro (or the middle or ending for that matter) picking up your voice on the built-in mic in order to help you time the recording and pacing knowing that you are able to redo the voice-over on another “track” later, and, you are only going to record the intro now. No need for endurance, let’s build up this screencast bottom up like we might build up a software program in Lisp or Smalltalk for example. If you think about it, screencasting can be a lot like writing, English or code: quick bursts of captured ideation that are composited and edited into a whole.

Here is what the layout looks like when you stop a recording. I like the track layout, reminds me of working in Pro Tools which is familiar to me:

Where Screenflow really shines is what comes next: editing. This is where you either begin to dislike screencasting in general or enjoy it depending on what software you are using. For me, this is the key advantage of Screenflow over the other screencasting apps I tried. I’ll point a few things that I really like.

First, I like the track layout (the main window area at the bottom where the graphical reresentation of the recordings resides). The UI is very well organized in that most editing actions happen on the track itself, e.g., inserting chapter marks, inserting text, overlaying tracks on the same track, transitions, etc. Finer points of detail are examined and controlled in the properties inspector. It is a window in the upper right that nicely organizes detailed information grouped by media or function and easily recognizable by iconic tabs buttons. It is in the properties inspector where you see just how far they are pushing the concept of what can be done inside screencasting software before ever hassling with Final Cut Pro.

I like the media properties tab because can drag media elements created internally and externally from this central repository to build up screencasts in a modular fashion. I like being able to quickly reassemble/compose my final product by dragging media items from the media pane into tracks below. Nice clean fast workflow.

Another time saver and usability win that I really like with Screenflow: creating chapters. It is always nice if you produce a screencast of any length to insert chapters so that viewers can jump to the part of the movie they want to watch (just like on a DVD). You have to do some silly hoop jumping to get this done with some of the other screencasting apps I tried, even editing a file using special syntax in one case. This is 2010, we won’t be doing any of that unless we are writing code. In Screenflow, it is brain dead simple to add chapters and have them export correctly to Quicktime output. You simply click on the track where you think a chapter should start and hit the backtick key on your keyboard: `. Doing so pops up a nice little unobtrusive dialog text input window where you simply type in the title chapter and click ok. After creating them you can even drag them to new locations and they all export just fine to Quicktime. That’s it. Big deal you say? Then obviously you haven’t tried the alternatives.

When you are ready to add some polish in the form of editing mistakes, adding effects, etc, you are going to appreciate that most of these actions all happen on the track itself through a combination of clicking, dragging, etc.. This is important because it reduces a lot of cognitive dissonance when using the software since a lot of things work the way you think they should in a direct way. Big time saver and frustration eliminator.

I’d like to mention a couple resources that can help you get ramped up on screencasting. Geoffrey Grosenbach’s company Peepcode, http://peepcode.com, produce nice screencasts. In particular, I’d like to direct you to his two screencasts about screencasting: Screencasting on the Mac and Screencast with Final Cut Pro. Not only will they teach you some of Geoffrey’s tricks, but all of Peepcode’s screencasts are examples themselves of good execution. I watched the first one and it was helpful to me. He uses a different screencasting software app in that screencast, but many of the tips he gives including exporting to Quicktime settings are directly applicable to Screenflow since they are actually OS-level controls (I am guessing since they looked the same in either application). I am pretty sure the Peepcode screencast saved me several hours, especially with regard to export settings, that stuff only comes from experience.

I encourage you to check out Screenflow, you can freely demo the software and see if it works for you.