XtremeCamera

Would you spend $100 on screen capture software?

Software: ScreenFlow
Platform: Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
Maker: Vara Software
Cost: $99 (single user license)
URL: http://www.varasoftware.com/

Is it worth it? – Oh yea, and more. There is NO better software for screencasting on the market. And if you use your screencasting in your photo business, as tutorials, demonstrations, or other purposes, this is your savior.

You just might if you were trying out a demo of the newest movie screen capturing software for Mac users. Vara Software’s Leopard-only ScreenFlow isn’t cheap, but then again you’ve never seen anything like it before.

A friend of mine is a shareware developer and he loves to make video tutorials of his products so the people that buy his products can get the most out of them. So a few months back he showed me his latest product and the video he made to go along with it. To be honest I was more impressed with the video tutorial than the actual software. After watching it I knew I had to review it.

ScreenFlow to the rescue!

ScreenFlow is a Leopard-only screen capture software that packs more punch than any of the competitors, including Ambrosia’s long-in-tooth SnapzPro.

Multiple video and audio

First, ScreenFlow captures your entire desktop, including Apple’s 30” behemonth Cinema Display. But, even though the software captures the entire desktop it will only encode the areas of the screen that change, providing you with a large margain of error as you go about recording what’s happening on the screen. In addition, if you have an iSight or a DV camera attached it is powerful enough to capture the image at the same time.

Once you’re done recording you can resize and place the iSight recording anywhere in the overall movie. Its really amazing to see, and shows off both the power of Leopard and the power of the state-of-the-art algorithms built into ScreenFlow. Oh, and it can record the audio coming from your computer AND the iSight/DV camera and allows you to edit both audio tracks individually. There has never been anything like ScreenFlow before.

Editing

Once you finish recording the screen automatically changes into a beautiful editing suite with a timeline interface. Special effects, such as pan and zoom, drop sahdows, and even reflection are easy to do, and are done in realtime. You can also import existing video clips and make them a part of the video project.

My first thoughts when I discovered that the software captures the entire desktop instead of a box you can draw on the screen ala SnapzPro I thought I would wind up with a lot of wasted space in my movies. If I wanted to show off our new uploading window on XtremeCamera I certainly don’t need the entire display, just the browser window.

Callouts

The ingenious utilization of Callouts in ScreenFlow you can highlight and focus only on those things in the foreground window.

What impressed me most about watching my friend’s tutorial was how certain mouse clicks would show a cool attention-grabbing circle around the area you are clicking, making it simple to follow the tutorial. What would usually take a lot of time to add in through video editing software like Final Cut Pro takes a mouse click in ScreenFlow.

ScreenFlow exports your movie in whatever size you need it to be, while maintaing exteraorindary quality in the export. Its so good that despite this movie being created on a 30” display you can plainly see the small text in the browser window. Try that with other screen capture software!

Why Leopard?

ScreenFlow is Leopard only, and with good reason. Leopard is 64-bit out of the box, and so is ScreenFlow. This 64-bit, multithreaded SSE & Altivec compression system can handle all the movement you can throw at it, yet is able to keep the file size manageble and quality surperb.

ScreenFlow uses top Apple technologies like Core Animation, QuickLook, Spotlight, QTKit, Quartz Composer, Core Image, OpenGL, and more. Only Leopard could offer this much power and only ScreenFlow can utilize Leopard’s power in a meaningful way.

If you’re looking for the absolute best software for creating great looking, special effects laden, screen video then look no further than ScreenFlow. Head over to Vara Software and download the fully functional demo version. I’m betting that once you try it you’ll see that if you need to create videos on of you Mac desktop you’ll want to do it with ScreenFlow.

Steven McBride
Technology Editor
Admin
Tech Support
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