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» Screen Recording Software 101

Recording screencasts and podcasts is at an all time high right now and it’s really something that’s the newest trends. There’s just the one standing question that many others and I get asked. Which application do you use for recording your podcasts and tutorials? By no means can I ever say which application is right for you but I’m offering here suggestions on the software I like and use when recording, both Mac and Windows.

 

ScreenFlow (Mac)

I got turned onto this program quite a while ago and while I was skeptical to it at first (I was happy with the one I was using), it’s really changed my podcast workflow. ScreenFlow is really an ultimate when it comes to recording your screen. You can’t just record audio and the screen video but also record the computer audio as well as a video camera track so that you can also appear in your video, which is really useful instead of needing to go to a video editing program to do that separately. Another great feature about ScreenFlow is the ability to add mouse and window callouts, directly in the editing part of the program.

If you were to start saying one feature that is both good and bad, it’s that you have to export the move to get it to a .mov file for example as compared to an application like iShowU which renders the file directly. Now, there is a beauty with this, which is that you don’t have to do conversions; you get them done on export to the format you want. If I want an Apple TV resized version, I’ll just enter that in and I’ll get one.

Another thing I like about ScreenFlow is that I can easily through the timeline editing add a premade intro and outro, again without having to go through another application to import and export different clips.

ScreenFlow is available for $99 from Vara Software.

iShowU – the original (Mac)

This is another popular screen recording application, again for Mac only. What I like about this one is that I can record a specific part of my screen only and change the size as I wish there. I also get a movie file finished as soon as I press the stop recording button which means I don’t have to wait for any exporting to be done. Also when I don’t really need to be doing any edits to the video, I’m using iShowU for maximum output speed.

To compare against ScreenFlow is not really fair. They’re aimed slightly different as iShowU doesn’t provide any editing capabilities but on the fly output, which makes it great for some things and not so great for some.

Myself, I combine both ScreenFlow and iShowU in my video workflow depending on what I want to do.

At the moment I’m in the process of trying out iShowU HD that seem to be giving me some pretty cool features. It seems to be able to streamline the editing even further by making it able to go between it and Final Cut quick. I haven’t really got enough testing done to include it fully in the review here.

iShowU (the original) is available from ShinyWhiteBox for $20.

Camtasia Studio (Win)

Camtasia Studio is the premiere windows screen recording program. While rather at the expensive side it provides full editing and easy publishing capabilities into a number of different formats. Really though, I can’t speak too closely about it since I’m just about always recording my videos on my Mac and very rarely do recording on a PC. My own experiences with this program though say that I would be using none other than this one to do any recording on the PC (and when I’m on a windows machine, I use Camtasia).

It runs at $299 from TechSmith.

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Erik is a web designer, photographer and software trainer who runs web design company XLD Studios as well as software training company Bernskiold Media. Both web design and teching to others is one of his great passions. Another passion is photography and at his portfolio you can find many great collections of nature photographs.