After having read the great article “A Review of Video Screen Capture Software for Mac OS X”, I have finally selected iShowU as my tool of choice for recording my screencastings under Mac OS X. (I tried Snapz Pro X, but it’s not a Universal binary…)
iShowU is a nice tool with a focus strictly on recording. But what about enhancing the movie? Well, of course there are add-ons like OmniDazzle, Mouseposé and others that you can use during recording. These effects really show off. But I mean something for a quick post-editing, like voice-over and text boxes or bubbles.
It turned out that all tools I was longing for were already installed on my Mac, but I just haven’t been aware. First of all, GarageBand is great for adding voice-over, sound effects and background music. Put each of them into a separate track, adjust volumes, add effects (I like my voice a little deeper…). A perfect, very capable tool, easy too use. 100% Mac-like. And then Quicktime, well, the Pro edition. It has some features that make it a perfect match: text tracks and image tracks with a multitude of options, like transparency, effects and positions. The multi-track editor of Quicktime Pro is not so intuitive, but quite capable. It supports export to mp4, which produces perfect and small movies. For more fancy formats, like Flash (FLV), ffmpegX is the free tool of choice. See the posting “Flash Movie Conversion for Mac OS X” and “How to encode FLV” for an elaborate discussion.
I’ve uploaded my first Screencast to Youtube.com. It shows Quicktime Pro and how to enhance a screencast by adding text tracks and nice speech bubbles (really image tracks with a bubble exported from OmniGraffle; again, shipped with your Mac).
Quicktime Alternatives?
The alternatives to Quicktime Pro would be iMovie HD and Final Cut. Well, iMovie HD is targeted for editing DV material; one show stopper for me was the lack of support for custom dimensions, like 200 x 100. This is also true for Final Cut Express. The next issue with iMovie HD was the inferior export quality. As a result, this leaves only Final Cut Pro as a valid alternative, but it’s way too expensive for me.
Optimal Settings for Exporting Quicktime to Youtube.com
When publishing videos from Quicktime (i.e. .mov files) to Youtube.com, I had to tune the export settings. I’ve taken screenshots of the optimal settings (Photo set on Flickr.com). Without these, my uploaded videos always had some nasty artefacts caused by Youtube’s automatic conversion. (BTW, Youtube can digest a lot of video formats; it always converts them to mp4, NTSC/4, 320×240, 15fps with audio as MP3 at 22050 kHz. The video format is FLV.) But why export at all, and not just upload the .mov file? My .mov files had seperate tracks, which is fine usually, but Youtube only recognizes some of them; specifically it drops text and image tracks, and also video/sound tracks that are positioned at a specific starting time. I can collapse all tracks to just one audio and one video track by exporting to, for example, MP4.