The developers of the award-winning ScreenFlow application could have easily sat back, secure in their knowledge that they’ve produced what is unquestionably the best application of its kind available for the Mac. But they did not. And, the result is a more finely polished gem with even more power and flexibility than the original.
For those new to the program, what ScreenFlow does is let you capture the action on your computer screen, mix it (either in real time or later on) with other video and audio sources, and package it as a video. It’s an essential tool for creating training programs, demos and promotional videos for almost anything that’s can run on a Mac, including Windows and Linux systems running under Fusion or Parallels. The screen recording aspect is fairly simple. In fact, Snow Leopard can do that pretty much on its own. Where ScreenFlow excels is taking what you’ve captured and turning it into a program that effectively gets your information and ideas to your audience. To do this, ScreenFlow lets you edit, manipulate and enhance your captured clips and easily export the finished product to a wide variety of video formats. At its heart, it’s a simplified video editing system, fine-tuned for screen presentations.
What’s New ScreenFlow 2.0 adds a number of very slick editing features. For example, you can now overlap video clips, placing video transitions between them. This is a great way to separate different operations or show time passing between them. You can also speed up video clips and insert freeze frames. Video “actions” like zooming or panning around on the screen, adding a call-out or expanding the cursor, now have a very professional-looking ease-in and ease-out option, giving the moves a much more organic look and feel. ScreenFlow now lets you automatically lower the level of other sound sources, like computer sounds or a music bed, to make room for the narration. If you recorded video and sound together, you can now unlink the two tracks so they can be edited moved separately.
ScreenFlow also lets you adjust a number of properties for each video element, such as size, rotation and even reflection (a very cool graphic effect that’s built into the Mac OS via Core Animation). With the new version, you’re able to copy and paste the adjustments, making life easier for the editor wanting to give more continuity to the final product. One of the more brilliant ideas in this new version is the ability to hide all the icons on your Desktop, giving you a clean stage for your presentation. And, of course, there’s a feature that has become almost obligatory for any program that creates or manipulates video: direct upload to YouTube.
Working With ScreenFlow Of course, going the “quick and dirty” route with ScreenFlow is possible. It’s fairly easy to record, narrate and add a few visual flourishes and push the presentation out to your distribution medium of choice in a matter of minutes. However, the program seems to beg you to take more care with you handiwork, so you can publish something far more polished and far more useful.
Editing in ScreenFlow is non-destructive. The tracks you originally recorded are preserved intact through virtually all of the editing phases. Should you decide later that you cropped too much of the screen area in a certain scene, you can go back and expand it later. Effects, such as callouts (dimming the screen to highlight an area near the cursor) are layered on top of the screen and can be adjusted or moved at will.
Mastering the interface is a bit of work. It’s clean, simple and well organized, but some of the program’s most powerful features are not immediately obvious. Telestream provides some great video tutorials on the features. (Screen Flow is fully recursive. You can use it to record ScreenFlow sessions and develop your own ScreenFlow training guides.) We found that it’s well worth the effort to spend some time with the program before setting out on your first formal project to get familiar with all the program’s capabilities.
Unlike other screen recording tools, there is absolutely no need to get everything right in one take. A track sheet and media bin like you’d find in traditional video editing software gives you the ability to compile the presentation from a variety of takes. If you want to show some passage of time or simply want to avoid an abrupt jump cut, just call on any of the transition effects to more smoothly blend the two sequences together. If you need to adjust timing, ScreenFlow 2’s ability to generate freeze frames and smoothly expand or compress time will let you perfect the almost-but-not-quite clip.
Planning Still Pays All of these tools may tempt you to take a “we’ll-fix-it-in-post” approach to acquiring the base video for your project. But the program lends itself to a more professional approach to production. One you’ve explored the program enough to learn what it can do, you’ll find that you get the best results if you spend some time pre-production, scripting (or at least outlining) the narration then rehearsing and informally story-boarding the moves. To take a truly professional approach, you’ll also want to make sure that your presentation has stylistic continuity. Showing off every available ScreenFlow transition and callout effect in a single presentation may sound like fun, but it can be really distracting. It would be much better to pick and choose among the options to give your work a distinctive and recognizable look. The end result should be so natural that your audience completely forgets about the medium and is absorbed entirely in the message.
Even in the world of great Mac software, it is rare to see an application so well thought out, so well designed, and one that has taken such exquisite advantage of the latest tool that Apple has provided its developers. The original release of ScreenFlow swept two of the most important awards at Apple’s World Wide Developers’ Conference. ScreenFlow 2 proves that Telestream is set on making the best even better.
Some great online video demos and tutorials are available on their site.
