Excellent Training Video Tool: ScreenFlow
Friday, March 14th, 2008
If you create any sort of training videos for your clients, then you’ve most likely been using Ambrosia’s excellent SnapzPro.
SnapzPro has been the mainstay of desktop capture for years, but it’s somewhat of a one-trick pony. It captures the desktop action very well, but it offers nothing in the way of editing capabilities. It also restricts you more or less to a small view window, and you basically had to do everything in one clean take or bring multiple clips into a video editor to bring everything together.
Now, we have ScreenFlow from Vara Software. This $99 Leopard-only app lets you capture your desktop just like SnapzPro, but it does a whole lot more.
For starters, you can capture your entire desktop and pan around in a cropped version for optimal output. You can even capture your mug via your iSight and edit this into your video to add some variety to your output. There are callouts and cursor effects that you can layer in after the fact–something you used to be able to do only at run-time with OmniDazzle. Finally, there’s the timeline where you can edit, trim and otherwise perfect your output for professional results.
ScreenFlow is a huge timesaver and lets you produce training videos of a quality that was previously possible only with an expensive video editing package and multiple “takes” with Snapz.
Get the free demo of ScreenFlow here. You’ll be able to do everything you need to evaluate the software, but any output will be watermarked. The demo is otherwise identical to the unlocked version.
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