Screen Video Recording

[danika]

I'm looking for a utility to do screen video recording. So far I've tried ScreenMovie, Screenography, SnapZ, and Screen Mimic. They all record OK, but they're all terribly slow when rendering to a mov file. A 30-second video of a 1024 x 768 screen takes over 2 minutes in all of them.

Coming from the Windows world I'm used to just recording and saving videos as avi files without any delays. The video courses I produce usually have at least 300 clips, so 2 minutes each just isn't going to cut it.

Anybody know of a product or a file format that produces faster rendering?

 

[bmcgonag]

iShowu

Not free, but worth the 20 bucks. Some have suggested a free one called Copernicus, though I have never yet gotten it to work on my iMac Core 2 Duo, nor my MBP Core Duo. So beware on that one.

Brian

 

[Aptmunich]

Hey, thanks for these suggestions guys!

I've been looking around for some screencast apps - these look quite promising.

 

[danika]

FWIW somebody put me onto using SnapZ Pro with the Ensharpen codec from Techsmith. The save time for a 30-second mov file is less than 30 seconds, and the best part is that the mov file is less than 1 MB (versus about 30 MB for most other codecs I tried). The video quality is excellent. Techsmith claims the codec is lossless, and I believe them. They have a good reputation in the Windows world for producing small size avi files from screen video recordings, and it looks like they've been able to translate their magic to Macs. The solution isn't cheap--about $40 for SnapZ plus $150 for Ensharpen. However, this is my business, so it's worth it for me.