Edit Review: Telestream ScreenFlow 1.1

The main interface of Telestream ScreenFlow 1.1 provides a timeline where you can add transitions, mouse and window callouts, audio, and graphics, as well as edit your recorded video and presentation.

Screencasting software has been fairly prevalent for the Mac. There are numerous freeware, shareware, and commercial options. Most of these allow you to “record” the active desktop — including mouse movements, windows, your computer's audio output, etc. — and then export to standard video codecs and formats. When ScreenFlow from Vara Software arrived on the screen, it was a breath of fresh air. (Note: Telestream acquired Vara Software in August 2008.) It's not a dated program with a dusty interface that's been around for years; rather, it's a slick Leopard-only tool with a silky-smooth workflow that does much to harness OpenGL, Core Animation, Quartz Composer, and other Mac OS X technologies. ScreenFlow signals a new era of a growing marketplace and screencast creation, and it has put all others on notice. Now there's some undeniable competition.

More importantly, the way ScreenFlow works represents a paradigm shift for Mac-based screencast programs. The program allows you to edit and tweak windows, mouse movements, audio, and video after you are done recording. With most programs, the project ends when you click “stop recording.” in ScreenFlow, that's when the creative process begins.

ScreenFlow is a little too eager when you boot it up. It finds your videocamera or webcam automatically and allows you to select your audio, but then it launches straight into recording. Of course, you can set your own keyboard command to stop and start recording. After recording a test bit, hitting Stop dropped me directly into the main interface. Arranged like a stripped-down version of Apple iMovie, it has a main project window, a timeline, and a bin for all your audio, video, and graphics. Basically any webcam, Apple iSight camera, camcorder, headset, audio line-in, or microphone that is currently working with your Mac will show up. These can be selected from within ScreenFlow.

Choose your video source, and you get a live preview before you record. When you finish recording your video clip, it is now part of your screencast. However, the video in the preview window — say, your own talking head — goes away when you start recording your screencast. This is good and bad. It does keep you from constantly looking at yourself, but there is no way to see if the camera shifts or if any other problems occur until after you are done recording. Once you are done recording, the video window in your screencast is a separate object that you can resize, move, and even fade out. The preferred workflow is to edit the presentation after recording, so you move around the location of your video within the larger screen window during the editing process.

The editing part is where you get to be creative. The features really set the program apart from other screencast software programs. As I mentioned, you can move the video window around and resize it. You can even rotate it along any axis. Imagine a slightly tilted video clip tucked away on the lower-right side of the screencast of your active desktop. You can add a reflection or a drop shadow. Adding titling, setting a reflection, or inserting a shadow (you can adjust shadow offset, opacity, and blur) help lend your video — even if it's from a basic webcam — a professional feel.

For the desktop windows in your screencast, you can choose to show the mouse pointer. You have two options here: You can either automatically record your mouse-clicking sounds and zoom in to wherever the mouse is at any time, or you can highlight any mouse move or window by adding a callout. A callout is a point in your presentation timeline at which you want something to stand out. For example, highlight the mouse cursor and place an outline, a bordered circle, or a bright, feathered oval around it. You can set durations for your effects and have a highlight fade in rather than pop up.

Amazingly, ScreenFlow even lets you highlight the foreground window in your screencast. If you are recording your desktop and you bring up a program, with a few clicks, you can set it to slowly zoom in to the window while the background fades out to dark gray and blurs. Don't like it? Just delete the action and try something else.

Most of your work will be interacting with the timeline. Drag a graphic to your timeline and shrink it down as a watermark by reducing its opacity. Want to add music? Drag in an audio clip and then use the program to turn the audio level down so it plays under your vocal presentation. Any audio on the timeline can be faded up or down at any point. Forget to comment on something? Record a patch and add it. Need to make some edits? The software allows in/out points for cut-and-paste editing, as well as ripple editing and trimming by dragging. The program records whatever happens on your screen; you can record DVD video and audio for your presentation and have it play back at full speed within your presentation. You can also have multiple instances of ScreenFlow open at once so you can work on several timelines.

Once you have your entire presentation tweaked to perfection, it's time to export. There are several presets for web video, Apple TV and iPhone, and NTSC DV, but there's no Flash option. You can also export to any format supported under QuickTime, including Apple ProRes 422. When exporting, you can scale the movie up or down to any size, as well as add motion blur. Enabling motion blur upon export ensures that windows that move quickly or spin 180 degrees do so smoothly. Little touches such as this make the video look professional. Your file gets saved in Apple's package format, so your video elements are saved with your project as one file.

The program runs smoothly and quickly on a Mac Pro. I experimented with it on a client project by recording myself. One snag: I used a standard DV camcorder for video, and while I was editing, the camera shut down automatically after 5 minutes of disuse. ScreenFlow kept prompting me to check the camera because it saw that the camera was disconnected. Ideally, an external unit should be able to be shut down and not trigger prompts that disrupt the workflow.

Also, because this was a DV camera, the video was 720×480. When I played it back, the program did not adjust it to square pixels or remap to 640×480. As a result, the clips looked slightly elongated. Resizing the video is easy. You can move any side or hold shift to scale up and down, but there should be an option in the program to correct for aspect-ratio variations. This is hardly a deal-breaker. Also, ScreenFlow defaults to starting the capture program when you boot up your Mac without asking you. (This can be switched off in Preferences.)

Testing on a eight-core Mac Pro, I did have a couple of instances where I got hung up. The 1.0 version had a few rough edges that have been tightened up for the 1.1 update, so the program is maybe one update away from being bulletproof. On the plus side, you might have noticed that I did not stack the software up against other Mac screen-capture programs, and that's because ScreenFlow simply is in a class by itself. First, it harnesses the latest OS X technologies. Moreover, its focus on editing after recording, its professional-looking graphical options, and its ability to tweak/alter just about any element make ScreenFlow the leader in the Mac screencast market.

bottomline

Company: Telestream
www.telestream.net

Product: ScreenFlow 1.1

Assets: Allows editing after recording, harnesses Mac OS X technologies.

Caveats: Launches straight into recording on system boot up, limited aspect-ratio variations.

Demographic: Mac-based editors.

PRICE: $99

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