EXCLUSIVES

Snapz Pro X 2.0 with Movie Capture
By Trey Yancy

August 2004

One of the most overlooked aspects of Macintosh® graphics is the lowly screen shot. While popular with gamers and tech writers, screen captures are also of value to designers and other professionals who need to grab a quick low-rez image of a larger file or for such mundane tasks as recording the settings of a complex control panel without having to scribble everything down. You can take proper screen shots with Apple®’s bundled Grab application. You can, also, take shots in the non-graphic and utterly nonsensical PDF format using the traditional key strokes. Or, you can use a third party application. In my experience, the best of these screen capture tools so far is Snapz Pro X.

First introduced in the days of OS 7, Snapz Pro has grown from a nifty little utility to a fully tricked out OS X application with nearly as many options and features as the Batmobile. Even better, a version of SnapzPro is also available that provides high quality movie recording capabilities that put most competing applications to shame.

Interface and Operation
Snapz Pro is designed to launch on startup and to sit invisibly in the background until evoked by a customizable keystroke. It takes a second to open; but when activated, it calls up a tabbed panel with buttons for selecting the type of shot, including screen area, selection, object (a new feature), and, depending on your version of Snapz Pro, movie captures as well. Click on the desired button, and it calls up a settings panel. You can either go with the most recent setting or tweak away. Depending on the type of shot, you then select the item or area you wish to shoot. The panel fades away while you make your selection. Hit the return key to take your shot.

The panel also provides a pop-up list and a set of check boxes for specifying such things as application launching and send-to options including preset destination folders, printer, and email (the latter choice resulting in the file being placed in a new blank document in your default email application). Once you have specified your settings, you hit the return key to trigger the shot and are then presented with a dialogue box for naming the file.

There are quite a few options available for setting up screen shots, including such choices as eight different output formats, image scaling, border, customizable watermark and copyright notice, and fields for specifying size and preset aspect ratio. Other options include a choice of color palettes, scaling from 10-400%, thumbnail size, and sliders for opacity and intensity. An additional feature is the new fat bits preview window that provides a greatly magnified view of the area under your cursor.

Another feature is the preview button that allows the user to see her selection and related effects in a live-updating window. Make changes and the preview is updated live. Once you like what you see, hit the return key, and save the shot. Saving, by the way, is not via a navigation box but via the above mentioned pop-up list.

Video Capture
For an additional $40, you can move to SnapzPro with Movie Capture for recording onscreen action as a QuickTime® movie. Along with capturing video, it also supports voiceovers and is capable of recording any audio generated by your machine or applications. Does it have the MPEG decoder for recording stills or video from a DVD? No. But, the video recording tools come with quite a few options of their own. Along with a few options common to all of the mode panels, you can specify frame rates ranging from 1 FPS to 30 FPS, turn movie guides on and off, set cursor visibility, and select from a range of panning options, including fixed, follow, or smooth follow. A smoothing option is also available. After recording your movie, you are presented with a panel for specifying even more settings, including 26 still and video compression modes, automatic keyframe insertion, and the like. The right side of the panel features a reference image including a photo and a variety of interface elements for previewing the various color depth and quality settings in real time. As for movie quality, it is very good.

Observations
Unlike pre-OS X versions, Snapz Pro is an application and not an old-style extension. As such, if one were to accidentally quit or crash Snapz Pro instead of closing its window, the default COMMAND+SHIFT+3 keystroke would trigger a system default PDF screen shot instead. This happened to me more than once. Ambrosia recommends against launching Snapz Pro from the dock, but it is a good idea to have it in the dock in the event of an accidental quit.

It is important to note that Snapz Pro bars access to the Finder or other applications until you close the panel or take a shot, which makes it tough to shoot a series of stacked items. The only exception to this is the Compression Setting window that appears after recording a movie.

The OS X Quartz-powered fade in and fade out effects are a nice touch, but a second lost to superficial effects is a second lost. I would like to see the option of turning off this effect in the interest of increased productivity. Also on my wish list is the option to save files in any location, and not only in the fixed list of destinations.

As for overall use and functionality, this is a great little application. It provides a good balance of power and ease of use as well as generates high quality output and in a range of formats.

Conclusions
Snapz Pro X has a limited and specific function; but it is extremely good at what it does, and there are very few of us who wouldn’t be able to make productive use of it. It could stand a minor tweak here or there, but it is definitely on my must-have list.

Snaps Pro X 2.0 with Movie Capture
Pros: Wealth of options, excellent movie quality
Cons: Dominates machine when active,
Price: $69 ($29 without movie capture)
From: Ambrosia® Software