NMC 2009 - Producing Captivating Tutorials: Tools for Screen Capture and Recording

This was taught by Raymond Riley from Alma College. Ray showed some of the main screen capture programs and gave a synopsis of the good a bad qualities of each. He also introduced a few helper applications that went hand-in-hand with these programs to help you create better tutorials. A few of these were Backdrop, ScreenshotHelper, and XScope. 

Backdrop  is a simple utility to fill your screen with a white window so you can take screenshots without having to clean up your desktop. 

ScreenshotHelper shows a full screen window with a solid color or a desktop picture so that you  can take a clean screenshot without having irrelevant windows and desktop icons in the background. 

xScope is a useful utility that can give you the dimensions of any image on your web page, it can find distances in pixels between images,it can add pre-defined backdrops, rulers, guides, but most helpful for screen captures is its Loupe function. The Loupe can magnify any portion of your screen under the mouse.

Grab is a utility that is shipped with all Macs that can do screen captures. It can include the cursor in the screen capture as well. 

Screenshot Plus is an enhancement to Apple's Grab tool. It uses Grab to capture the image, but then allows you to scale and capture in a select format such as JPEG, TIFF, PSD, and more. 

Mousepose' is a tool that can dim the screen and put a spotlight on the area around the mouse pointer, easily guiding the audience's attention to an area of interest on the screen.

Omnidazzle is a set of fun and useful enhancements to help you highlight certain areas of your screen, create visual effects, and track the location of your mouse pointer. Some examples are that you can do a flashlight effect to highlight certain areas, draw odd-shaped boxes around certain information, auto-hightlight form fields with a box around them, yellow marker hightlighting, draw circles around words and object, a water-ripple effect wherever you click the mouse, comic book action stars with Pow!, Biff!, and Zot!, a footprints effect that walks across your screen, and also a zoom plugin.

He also showed the built-in ability of the Mac OS to zoom in and out of anything on the screen. This must first be enabled by going to the System Preferences/Universal Access settings and turning Zoom on. Default key command is SHIFT+APPLE+EQUALS and SHIFT+APPLE+MINUS. 

Another built-in Mac trick is to get great-looking icons by copying any application and pasting it into Preview. You will get a perfect icon of that application along with any alpha channel that may be associated with ti.

Soundflower lets us record the audio being played from the system

Snapz Pro: Good a still frame screen capture, but video takes a long time to render when you complete your screen recording. Good quality video, however, the audio export options are lacking. No AAC audio export option. 

iShowU can record video and audio on the screen into a QT movie in real time, it can pause and continue, the mouse can be recorded as a separate track, and it can record mic and system audio via Soundflower. The HD and HD Pro versions can also record keystrokes, and output from an iSight or DV camera.

Jing only records as SWF formatted movies. It can do still shots or video, can pause and continue, can record mic or system audio (however it is only at 22 kHz). The Pro version will save as MPEG-4 with no watermarks and can share directly to YouTube.

ScreenFlow was the presenter's s/w of choice for doing screen capture presentations. ScreenFlow gives you an audio and video timeline that allows you to edit your production afterwards, you can set markers that can make QT movie chapters, it can highlight an area in a circle, and titles get treated like any other video track.