Screencast Creation

Software
1

For all content creators, field guides, etc.

What software do you recommend for creating screencasts? I am working on a project highlighting the features of an app for a small niche community of users.

I will show the features of iOS and then later the website.

If you can comment on the following…

  1. Software Name
  2. Learning Curve
  3. Advice for beginners
  4. Why this software
  5. Difficulty level
    (Example - concerning Difficulty level. Omnifocus was never an app that I could jump in, I spent weeks reading about it and researching different perspectives and workflows before I finally made it my own. On the opposite, Drafts required no research whatsoever, I jumped in and went) - Yes, I know they are both 2 different apps and can’t be compared, just citing examples.

Thank you!

1 Like
2

I’ve been wondering about this too.
I think making a video about data processing would be a lot easier than writing it out and including a dozen screenshots.

3

Isn’t screenflow the de facto standard in this field?

I used the demo version for a couple quick internal (in the office, that is) video tutorial, and didn’t found it all that complicated.

But I’m not a content creator, just throwing my two cents :smiley:

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4

I just use the built-in QuickTime Player for all my screencasts. Most of them end up on Microsoft Stream for my company. Stream is nice because it automatically converts the speech to text and generates captions which can be easily edited.

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5

MacOS SetApp has Capto which I just learned has not only screen capture, but also video screen capture + video editing.

For editing, there’s always iMovie and FCP (Final Cut Pro) as well. Plus Motion for titles and motion graphics.

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6

I find Loom to be very well done:

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7

I go back and forth between Loom and Screencast-O-Matic:

I like and use both multiple times per week, if not per day.

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8

Many people do not know that you can use QuickTime Player for simple cuts in a video. The workflow is not as obvious as it could be, but it is very easy. Yesterday, I needed to cut out a few minutes from middle of a video. I used Quicktime Player to trim the video twice: once to keep the beginning part, and once to keep the end part.

I saved those two files as beginning.mp4 and end.mp4. Then I dragged end.mp4 from the Finder onto beginning.mp4 in QuickTime Player. The videos were joined into one which I saved as the final file.

For simple edits like this, QuickTime player is much faster than using a video editor like iMovie. It also does not affect the video quality at all and keeps the file size small.

1 Like
9

I was just looking into alternatives to macOS screen recording.
I looked at ScreenFlow which does look nice, but then found that Loom is now free for students and educators so I am going to give that a go.

Thanks for the link/nudge.

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