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Topics covered:

• Image masking and cropping
• Adjustments: Brightness, Contrast, Exposure, Saturation and more
• Instant Alpha
• Power user tips

Below is a sample of the video. The full screencast clocks in at just over 10 minutes.

If you have need to visually demonstrate your product, and you have the resources, then it just makes sense to produce a screencast. With the release of ScreenFlow 2.0, I thought it’d be useful to perform a real-world comparison review of the screencast heavyweight champ versus the relative newcomer (at least to the Mac), Camtasia.

Getting Started

I started this comparison by creating the same video in both Camtasia and ScreenFlow. Both applications are very straightforward to setup and get going in creating the screencast. Camtasia gets a little bit of an edge for configuration because, unlike ScreenFlow, you do not have to install a separate audio driver.

However, once you get started recording, both applications provide you with a simple countdown prior to recording. As a primer, try to write your script prior to recording. This way, you will have a consistent experience for your customer once you complete production.

Please note, I did not try to record a screencast across multiple displays or using an external microphone. I used what most of us have — a MacBook (or a desktop) and the built-in microphone.

Basic Editing

After I recorded the basic screencast, I was presented with the Editor window within each program:

Screenflow Main Window

Camtasia Main Window

Both programs have very similar editing experiences using a timeline. ScreenFlow has the added advantage of separating out the audio from the video portions of the recording. This is a great experience, because you can also add another voiceover quite easily. In contrast, Camtasia merges the audio and video. It wasn’t easily discoverable how to add or change the existing audio recording. With my limited skills, being able to re-record the audio as a separate track was very handy.

Enhancing Your Screencast Recording

Each has a plethora of features to modify your recording.

• Cropping: Remove extra portions of the video that you don’t need.
• Trimming: Remove any extra (or bad) audio/video from the timeline.
• Playback tools: Play, reverse, fast-forward.
• Import Media: Additional audio, video or images.
• And a whole lot more…

What’s nice is that as you begin to explore more in ScreenFlow and Camtasia, they both provide simple video tutorials to show you how to use the features. For someone new to creating screencasts, this is very helpful.

Here are a few glimpses of the app once I inserted some text, graphics and transitions.

ScreenFlow: with additional text box and transitions

Camtasia: with additional graphics, text and transitions

I did perform a little trimming (Camtasia calls this Delete or Ripple Delete) at the end of each video so that you can’t see me click/end the recordings (there is no way to avoid this, although it would be nice if both tools had this as an option). Both tools make this really easy to do.

Both applications have advanced audio capabilities. ScreenFlow has true audio ducking, or the ability to decrease the volume of one recording while another audio volume is increased. Camtasia offers audio transition effects, which offers some flexibility, but not anywhere near as rich as ScreenFlow.

Unfortunately, neither application has great iLife integration, so I can’t directly insert audio clips from GarageBand. I think this is a missed opportunity for both Camtasia and ScreenFlow.

The Victor

This is a tough call. However, I give the slight edge to ScreenFlow because of its ability to edit audio separately as well as its UI for editing different properties of a recording. I happen to prefer the overall Camtasia UI over ScreenFlow’s as it seems more like iMovie ’09 to me.

Ultimately, you have to decide which items are more important to you:

• Features/Functionality
• User Experience
• Price

ScreenFlow 2.0 is priced at $99 (or $29 for an upgrade). Similarly, Camtasia 1.0.1 is currently priced at $99 (this is a promotional price, the web site shows the full retail for $149).

If you have limited funds, there is the screen recording capability in QuickTime X, a component of Snow Leopard. If you’ve already upgraded to Snow Leopard, then you have this option available. Otherwise, the Snow Leopard upgrade is $29. Please note that QuickTime X is nowhere in the same league as ScreenFlow or Camtasia. However, if you have a new Mac that includes Snow Leopard and iLife ’09 (which includes iMovie ’09), you can make some very simple Screencasts, excluding the fancier features available from either ScreenFlow or Camtasia.

The Videos

Don’t laugh, they’re horrible.

Camtasia

ScreenFlow

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After loving Plasq’s Skitch for a while now, I didn’t think I could have feelings for another screen capture utility. At an early glance, it appears I may need to re-evaluate my former stance. Now a days, I’m really looking forward to LittleSnapper from Real Mac Software.

Today the Real Mac folks have released a great screencast of the application doing its thing, sharing screen captures, and I can’t be more excited! It looks very slick visually, and extremely organized for those hoping to keep their Pictures folder in a somewhat presentable state. Writing for The Apple Blog — and for far less important reasons — I take lots of screen shots, so features such as these have a lot of utility for me.

There’s a lot of other great looking features that I can’t wait to play with. Go ahead and take a look at the video below and you too can get excited.

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Psystar has officially decided to not go down without a fight. They requested more time to respond to the suit brought forth by Apple and are represented by lawyers from the firm Carr & Ferrell, ComputerWorld reports. They have until August 18th, if this motion is approved, to respond to the claims, which is a two-week delay.

Carr & Ferrell specialize in intellectual property suits and are located in Silicon Valley, strategically placed to offer their services to the heart of the tech industry. They represented burst.com in patent lawsuits against Microsoft and Apple. Those cases were settled with awards going to burst.com in the amounts of $60 million from Microsoft and $10 million from Apple (I don’t think they used that windfall to improve their website, though).

[Via ComputerWorld]

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When you’ve got a window open – be it Firefox, TextMate, etc, etc – there’s a title to that window at the top, and if it’s a file, there’s an icon positioned to the left of it. A nice trick in OS X is that you can drag that icon to the Finder to create an alias, or by holding down the OPTION key, you can make a copy of that file someplace as well.

Also, if you hold the COMMAND key (Apple key if you’re new ’round here) when clicking on that icon (or any part of the title in that bar) it’ll show you the path in which that file resides. So for instance, lately I’ve been going through some Ruby tutorials. The folder structures are many and a few levels deep. As I’m a relative n00b to this, the folder structures lose me quickly, so being able to CMD click on the title/icon at the top of the window and quickly see where I’m at is a huge help.

Ok so you’ve basically got it now. Below is a quickie screencast I recorded so you visual folks can get the idea. There’s no sound – it’s not broken, I just didn’t record any.

CMD Windowbar Trick (no sound!) – 5mb

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Jing’s image editor is lightyears away from being as awesome as that of Skitch, so beyond the ability to grab a screen capture, there’s little similarity. However like the MySkitch service, you can quickly upload your pictures and video to an online storage service. The video capture function seems slightly limited, in that you select a part of your screen, and [from what I could tell] it doesn’t allow the option to follow your cursor around. Additionally, the video is compressed into a .swf Flash format. That’s ok for embedding in websites, but limiting if you want to do much else with it.

Limitations aside, Jing is a really nice collection of tools and services for those who want to produce screencasts and take screen captures to share easily. Jing is available for both Windows and OS X. For now it’s free, but based on this quote,

It’s something we want to give you, along with some online media hosting, to see how you use it. The project will eventually turn into something else.

I’m weary of a bait-and-switch down the road. Ok, maybe bait-and-switch is a bit of a harsh term. Likely this method of product offering is just a good way to determine product and service placement for future projects. But I read it as the service not remaining in this format forever, but only for the data-collection period. Anyway, my conspiracy theory be darned, it’s worth a try.

On a side note, I’ve got a handful of Skitch invites if anyone wants them. Email me. I’ll post whenever I get more, but for now they’re all gone.

Oh, and incidentally, I still used Skitch to grab/post the Jing graphic for this post.
hahaha

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Perhaps too often, we (as in the collective web) focus our attention on the cutting edge features of Quicksilver. Unfortunately that can make for a steep barrier to entry into this amazingly powerful program. So I wanted to take a step back and show a simple trick or two that makes Quicksilver valuable to the new user (either of Quicksilver, or the Apple platform in general).

To those veterans of our favorite launcher, this screencast may not be much for you, and I do apologize for that. I’ll do my best to expose something new and exciting with Quicksilver in the coming week or two. But for those who really don’t know Quicksilver from a hole in the ground, this aims to serve as a useful [visual] primer on getting started with a life-altering application. (I’m serious about the ‘life-altering’ thing.)

Following a simple but useful function of Quicksilver, I’ll cover the Preferences and various sections within that can help enhance your Quicksilver experience. For those who have followed along with my past screencasts, this isn’t another ‘Setup’ – instead this is aimed at explaining the various functions in Preferences, like Rescanning catalogs, finding information about plugins, and things of that nature.

You can grab this screencast in .mov format directly (below), or you can subscribe to our new TAB Screencasts feed here, or via iTunes.

Quicksilver – The Beginner’s Walkthrough (mov)
20 mins / 138 mb

This is a long one (apologies if it gets repetitive, but I wanted to cater to the new-to-Quicksilver crowd). Please feel free to leave questions below in the comments section, and we’ll do our best to answer them promptly.

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