My Screencast Setup
May 06, 2007
I’m frequently amazed at how many emails I get asking about the setup I have for recording my screencasts and also the compression settings that I use for my video. Having answered a good 10 emails in the past week or two on the subject, I figured it was high time I posted it up so that people could find it on the site. I cover pretty much everything I’m normally asked but I won’t go into too much detail with the video settings as it could get a bit lengthy…
Software
The last two I haven’t actually used yet (I picked them up a week or two ago) and they’re purely optional, but they can add extra visual cues which help the viewer. You can also replace Quicktime Pro with a video conversion app of your choice (iSquint or Visualhub (recommended) for instance). And iShowU is a decent alternative to Snapz Pro X though for good results I’ve found you need a bit of a higher spec system.
As for hardware, the only thing I use is my iMac G5. I really should invest in a better microphone (and you should too!) as I don’t sound particularly great using the inbuilt one.
Workflow
I start out in Snapz Pro X recording at 15fps (a lower FPS will give you a smaller file size and when you’re just doing recordings on screen you don’t really notice it). Once it’s done I save it off using the Animation Codec. Ideally I would save it to h.264 right then, but there’s a bug in the implementation (not in Snapz Pro, it’s an OS thing) that breaks h.264 video if it has key frames.
Note – I don’t have any “proper” video editing software so I always have to go for one straight take where everything’s as good as possible. There’s really very little post production once it’s recorded.
Once it’s saved off in Animation I open it up in quicktime pro which is where I do the final conversion to h.264 before uploading. Here’s a screenshot of my settings:
There’s one setting you can’t see in that shot, it’s called Temporal Compression and it’s found under the Compressor section in the bottom left. If you hover over that part of the dialogue and hold down the alt key the slider will change to Temporal. I set mine to somewhere between low and medium. Generally if you’re doing a simple screencast then you can keep it low without any problems. If there’s a lot of movement in the video then you’ll probably need to set it a bit higher to maintain video quality.
For sound I just tend to use AAC with a fairly low bit rate, not really anything special. I might take more time on it once I have a new microphone.
That’s pretty much it, hopefully that covers everything but I’m sure you’ll mail me if I’ve missed something you wanted to know.
Feedback?
If you’ve found errors or have some feedback please . Comments aren’t currently enabled due to spam but I’m sure they’ll return in the future.