We are happy to announce the availablity of ScreenFlow 2.1. This is a free update for existing ScreenFlow 2.x customers and a $29 paid upgrade for ScreenFlow 1.x customers.

The big news:

• New Flash Publish feature. ScreenFlow can now create an all-in-one Flash video presentation, ready for easy upload straight to your website. The HTML, video and Flash player component are automatically created by ScreenFlow in a single step.
• 64-bit support for audio capture. The audio driver used by ScreenFlow to capture system audio will now run on 64-bit Snow Leopard kernels.
• Automatic saving of documents. ScreenFlow will continuously save changes to your documents in the background, ready to recover any unsaved edits in the unlikely event a fatal error occurs.

Other enhancements and fixes include:

• Improved performance of moving clips around the timeline
• Fixed YouTube publishing failures when using a Google account (rather than a YouTube one)
• Fixed certain audio playback problems that could occur on 44.1khz devices
• Fixed lockup that could occur when exporting a selected range with a multi-pass encoder preset
• Fixed potential hang-up when the monitor being captured from is disconnected
• Fixed problem opening Automator actions under Snow Leopard
• Modified the aspect ratio of YouTube HD upload
• Fixed problem using CamTwist as source for video capture
• Fixed an issue where ripple deleting could cause the video to go blank
• Present the delete & backspace keys correctly when visualizing the key strokes
• ScreenFlow now preserves the selection of top-most layers when moving objects
• Fixed an issue that could cause files to keep increasing in size while the recording was paused
• Corrected a problem that could stop temporary recording files from being deleted

If you’re already a 2.x user, the easiest way to update is to “Check for updates” from within the ScreenFlow application. Alternatively, you can go to our website, where there are instructions on how to upgrade.

Enjoy! And let me know what you think.

Dr. Frank Lowney

As the Senior Director for External Projects in Web Enabled Resources, as well as a Professor in the School of Education at Georgia College & State University, Frank adds an interesting angle to this series in that he’s using screencasting in novel ways to aid in teaching and learning.

The way he uses ScreenFlow really sparked some new ideas for me about other ways I could be using screencasting. Read on, and hopefully, it will spark some ideas for you as well.

1) How long have you been screencasting and approximately how many screencasts have you made?

I’ve been screencasting since before 2000, starting with SnapzPro. I still use Snapz Pro X for screen shots but seldom use the movie option now that I have ScreenFlow. When QuickTime 3 introduced interactive “wired” sprites, several apps to make use of this capability sprang forth. The most powerful of these was LiveStage Pro (LSP c. 2001). This offered me a completely different approach to screencasting. LSP was a very powerful tool with a steep learning curve. Here’s an example of one of those early screencasts.

Note the CC toggle button (click on it and see what happens) and the green arrow that moves around. These interactive screencasts were all done with “wired sprites.” LiveStage Pro exposed this and much, much more with a scripting language called QScript. Something like Flash ActionScript or Silverlight scripting. For good or for ill, Apple is moving away from this model and toward HTML 5 so I don’t use LiveStage Pro anymore. QuickTime Player X will not play these movies but QuickTime 7.x or the QuickTime web plug-in will play them so use one of those instead.

Then I discovered ScreenFlow. What an epiphany after hand-wiring movies with QScript! An Apple engineer that I was working with on an obscure problem showed me one of his first screencasts to help me better understand the issue that we were discussing. It was done in ScreenFlow 1.0 and it knocked my socks off!

ScreenFlow was owned by Vara Software at the time and I immediately struck up a relationship with the developers. I was able to help them with a problem related to 30” Cinema Displays and they helped me learn the basics and patiently listened to all of my enhancement requests. The rest, as they say, is well known history.

Because I’m always trying to explain some concept in educational technology or trying convince someone that a project is worth funding, I am always working on a screencast. I think, therefore I screencast (with apologies to Descartes).

2) For what purposes and what audiences to do you make your screencasts?

In addition to my association with Georgia College & State University as a Professor of Education, I am also associated with the Georgia Digital Innovation Group which is housed on the GCSU campus. The DI Group sponsors the adoption and use of educational technologies throughout the 35 institutions that make up the University System of Georgia. Thus, I get to work with faculty, staff and others on a state-wide basis. We also seek external funding and partnerships for those efforts. One of our associates is Telestream.

Thus, I have many different audiences and many different stories to tell. So, here’s a little two column matrix with purpose on the left and audience(s) on the right:

3) What kind of studio or set up do you have?

Dr. Lowney's Office

... and the home office

Some of my screencasts are done live so, for those, I rely on my MacBook Pro with built-in mic and camera and try to deal with whatever conditions I find on location. For these, I often feel the need to do much more post processing of audio. There are two other locations that I use, my university office and my home office. In these locations, I use a Mac Pro and a Samson CO1U USB mic.

4) What do you find to be the most challenging aspect of creating your screencasts?

Getting “the story” straight in my own mind. To meet this challenge, I often use screencasting as a “tool to think with.” There’s an old adage, “He learns best who prepares to teach,” which seems to work pretty well in my case. I learn all sorts of things I didn’t know before I start to prepare a screencast and sometimes I find a few bugs too. Since I work with emerging educational technologies, I don’t have a lot of precedent to build upon. Thus, it often happens that I feel the need to re-do a screencast several times before I am satisfied that I have the story straight. Then, I start agonizing over the pedagogy of presentation. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to carry this process out to its logical conclusion for every project so many of my screencasts are “works in progress” awaiting their next upgrade. I even have a long queue of screencasts yet to be done.

BTW, this idea of computer environments as “tools to think with” originates with Seymour Papert, MIT prof, creator of the LOGO computer language and author of “Mindstorms” where he articulated this notion so very clearly. He based his ideas on the theoretical work of Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky.

5) What’s the process you use for creating your screencasts?

That all depends upon the objective and the audience (see matrix above). Thus, I have many different strategies. I have no one-size-fits-all approach.

So, let me pick one recent screencast and talk about that because it’s still fresh in memory. The objective was to prepare for an important upcoming presentation where I had only 45 minutes to talk about stuff that was still new to me, not to mention even newer to my audience. What to say and how to say it clearly to an audience savvy in distance education in 45 minutes or less. That was the challenge.

So I started out in Keynote to cover the topic. I often use many little screencasts in my presentations because they say so much in a short period of time. Doing those short screencasts helped me identify the things I didn’t really understand as well as I should. More research. More screencasts. More slides. This is an iterative process that goes on until I am satisfied that I understand the topics well enough to help someone else do likewise. The next step was to add slides to Keynote that introduce the key ideas and the screencasts. To this, I added annotations as speakers’ notes making them verbatim and very script like. This, too, is an iterative process and sometimes includes enlisting others for comment and criticism.

Next, I practice the presentation using two displays, one being captured by ScreenFlow and the other to display speakers notes and other Keynote presenters’ tools. For this objective, I do everything simultaneously because that best replicates the situation that I am training myself for. You might also call this “nested” screencasting because I am making one big screencast of the smaller screencasts in my presentation. This, too, is an iterative process. Not only am I cutting less important things out to meet the time limit, I am also continuing to discover or invent better ways to describe and illustrate the key ideas. It can even happen that I go back to square one on some aspect of the presentation or another. Keynote typography, shapes, builds, transitions and animations can add a lot to the impact of the final screencast.

Finally, I have the message and the delivery as right as I can make it and I can file that screencast and related assets away for repurposing later on or I can also make it available to attendees for review and others who didn’t have the opportunity to experience the presentation in person. Later on, I want to incorporate green screening so that I may really get into my screencasts.

6) Do you have a screencast that you’re especially proud of?

I don’t yet have a screencast that I’m proud of because of its technical excellence or innovation yet but I do have this one which was created to rehearse for a presentation that I recently delivered. This is the same screencast referenced in my response to the previous question. What I’m most happy with here is that I have been able to present and use this work in multiple ways as follows:

• This web page was offered to conference attendees as a “companion site” for the presentation. It not only contains links to in-depth treatments of topics covered in the presentation but also includes the rehearsal screencast for review and wider sharing after and beyond the face-to-face version.
• The companion site also illustrates multiple ways of sharing video, screencasts included. The iTunes view relies on a special server that we developed for the University System of Georgia but you can achieve a similar effect with any server that auto-generates an RSS feed or you can manually maintain an RSS feed on any standard web server with nothing more than a text editor. The iPhone web app presentation is also auto-generated by this specialized server.
• I have been asked to give this presentation to other audiences so will try to use it as an experiment with the screencast as an “advance organizer.” In these cases, I will ask the audience to view the screencast prior to the face-to-face session to see if we can elevate the level of conversation from basic information gathering to something approaching analysis, synthesis and evaluation. We shall see.
• I may continue to tweak this project so as to exemplify other things that I think are important to educational video. Adding toggle-able soft subtitles in English and other languages is one and adding chapter markers to review specific topics is another.

7) What other programs/accessories do you use besides ScreenFlow to create your screencasts?

I don’t do a lot of camera work to produce talking heads or talking torsos because I want to make that kind of footage add to the message in important ways instead of using up a lot of precious pixels in simply branding it as mine. This is also why I’m so interested in seeing green screening come to ScreenFlow. However, when I do use a camera, I use the Apple iSight preferring the now discontinued external model because it is so much more versatile. Although green screening might change my mind, these video cameras are just fine for me right now. I do like to use the Internet Archive to get interesting and unencumbered video clips but sometimes break out my old Canon Optura 100 to capture original video where portability is necessary.

Microphones are a different story. Although I will use the built-in mic when I have to, I prefer getting better input than that. On the road with live screencasting, I can sometimes use the sound system provided by the venue to do direct input into a laptop. This is really great where they have a mixer and wireless mics so that audience questions can be picked up. TIP: If you can’t do that, always repeat the question so that folks who listen later can get both the Q and the A in Q&A.

For studio recording, I use a USB mic but would love to have amps, mixers, filters and so on. The Samson CO1U works fine for me but I’ve heard good things about the CO3U and the Blue Snowball. Being hearing impaired, I also find it useful to use headphones that cover my entire ear, including hearing aids. Getting competing sound out of the way is very helpful. I am currently using the Sennheiser headphone and like it very much.

Because I often don’t get to record audio in the best possible circumstances, I rely rather heavily on software that helps me clean it up. SoundSoap, from BIAS, works great as a standalone app but it’s also a VST Plug-in so can integrate with other audio software such as SoundStudio (Freeverse). Unfortunately, the current version of SoundStudio isn’t talking to SoundSoap so I have to use them separately for the time being. TIP: Always record several seconds without speaking so as to have a sample of whatever noise there is that will need to be filtered out. SoundSoap will “learn” this noise and get rid of it for you while preserving the human voice.

8) What advice would you give to someone just starting out screencasting?

The classic principles of communication are still operative and every bit as important as they have ever been, even in this digital age. Those principles are:

1. Understand your message and
2. Understand your audience.

I find both of these very challenging, especially since my audiences tend to be composed of some exceedingly sharp folks. Of course, that’s also a great opportunity. For example, one of the most important things to understand about your audience is what they already know. This will provide you with a list of metaphors that you can use to link your message to, conceptual “hooks” so to speak. It is very effective to be able to say “A is like B” where “A” is a part of your message and “B” is a concept that your audience is very familiar with.

9) What’s the stupidest mistake you’ve made when creating a screencast?

I did a presentation that I was also recording “live.” The presentation was well received and lots of people came up afterwards with questions and comments. The next speaker needed to set-up and so I tried to multi-task answering questions and clearing my speakers, laptop and associated wires from the podium. In all of that hubub, I shut my laptop down and clicked through all of the dialogs, including the one from ScreenFlow asking me whether I wanted to save my project or not. I learned a lot there such as “haste makes waste” and that multi-tasking is something that humans don’t do so well. I also learned that I could re-record the presentation later on and post the screencast as part of a podcast channel as I had promised. The delayed version was actually a little better.

10) Besides ScreenFlow what are your favorite programs for the mac?

I really like Keynote because I think in schematic, visual terms and it’s such a great outliner and visualizer. I like OmniOutliner and OmniGraffle for similar reasons. I use ScreenSplitr and DemoGod on the iPhone and iPod touch to visualize those environments and other emulators such as Einstein (Newton) to be better able to talk about those where necessary. Handbrake, Episode Pro and QuickTime Player Pro 7 and QuickTime Player X are also faves. For the exotic stuff where muxing MPEG-4 is required, I really like Subler (free) for installing multiple soft subtitle and alternate audio tracks. For creating properly timed soft subtitles, I find Jubler (free) to be just right.

Thanks Frank!

ScreenFlow already offers some very powerful options for highlighting your mouse, and highlighting a foreground window. But occasionally, I have a need to highlight a square area of my screen, and the mouse highlight doesn’t quite work for it. OmniDazzle lets you choose a shape and highlight or “cut out” an area you want to highlight. As you highlight, the rest of the screen darkens, making your desired highlight very visible. This is just one of the many cool little effects and highlights you can do with OmniDazzle.

Take a look at this short video to see just a few of the capabilities of OmniDazzle.

(Having trouble viewing this? View in a web browser)

OmniDazzle is free, and offered by a company called OmniGroup. I found it fairly easy to jump in and figure out how to use, though there is a help file if needed.

Do you have any free or inexpensive products you use to enhance your ScreenFlow presentations? If so, let me know.

Let me first defend myself by saying: I’ve been using WordPress for quite a while; I’ve added dozens, if not hundreds of successful URL links. But suddenly, this particular link kept redirecting to my blog instead of to the desired external page. Surely this was a WordPress bug. (It couldn’t possibly be USER ERROR!)

I looked at WordPress forums and did a search for similar problems, to no avail. I finally contacted a WordPress-savvy friend. I explained my problem, and he didn’t have an immediate solution. He asked me to record a screencast of my process, which I did with ScreenFlow. Upon seeing my screencast, he immediately contacted me and told me I was forgetting to put “http://” in front of my URL.

DUH! Yeah, OK, I felt really stupid. (And again, let me defend myself by saying:  Of course I know that – it was clearly a case of caffeine-deficiency rendering me unable to complete basic thoughts.)  Even though I explained my problem to him, what it finally took was a simple screencast for my friend to see what I was doing wrong and put me on the right track.

This made me want to herald the virtues of screencasting as a tech support tool.

Go beyond simple communication

Getting to the bottom of technical support problems often involves the user describing to the support technician exactly what he or she is doing. Even with the best communication skills, when someone who is frustrated and been trying to solve a problem for awhile describes his problem, he can easily leave out critical information – either because he doesn’t know it’s critical, or because he’s already eliminated it as a possible problem during his own efforts to solve the issue.

In my case, I kept telling my friend I was “entering the URL”. As a user, I was frustrated and SURE that my problem had something to do with WordPress. So, when I explained my issue, the last thing on my mind was that I was doing something wrong.  From this perspective, it is easy to see how minor details can easily be left out during a conversation. When there are native language differences between the user and the technician, this can make it even more complicated.

Having the user create a quick screencast to detail his or her process can mean the difference between a frustrating support experience and a successful support experience. Especially helpful for a user to include in a screencast is a shot of your software version number, or browser version number, or any other operating system or configuration that the support tech will need to help diagnose the issue.

A tool for both the “supportee” and the “supporter”

My example was from a user perspective, but screencasting can also be useful for helping support technicians demonstrate solutions to issues as well. Here at Telestream, our support department is using ScreenFlow more and more often to help demonstrate to users how to solve their issues. Rather than trying to describe the step-by-step procedure(s) for fixing a problem, our technicians are whipping up short ScreenFlow demonstrations, with basic narration, to describe and demonstrate the solutions.

The added benefit is that they then have a ready-made answer for others who call in with the same support issue, saving them lots of time.

So the next time you have a support issue, I suggest making a screencast, to help you get answers fast!

Have you used screencasting to help solve a tech support issue (either as a user or as the one providing support?) What has been your experience? What advice would you give to anyone using screencasting to help them get or give support?

ScreenFlow, by design, captures the entire screen during recording. You can then crop to your desired screen size or window size afterward.  But capturing the full screen is a very deliberate product feature in ScreenFlow, and there are a couple of reasons for that:

1) Full-screen capture enables certain other capabilities: The very nature of ScreenFlow is that it is built around Mac OS technology. ScreenFlow captures the entire screen which allows it to take advantage of certain features specific to the way the Macs handle graphics – features that otherwise wouldn’t be possible if it only captured partial screen. ScreenFlow’s ability to highlight a foreground window is one example of a feature enabled by full-screen capture.  Using a different technology would mean losing some major features in ScreenFlow.

2) Full-screen capture requires less pre-planning: With full-screen capture, you’ll often end up spending less time planning your screencasts prior to recording, and more time doing edits during post-production. But, in my opinion, it’s a lot easier to spend time zooming and cropping in post-production, than it is to re-record whole segments upon realizing a particularly important item on screen did not get recorded!

3)  Full-screen capture gives you a versatile “master” recording. Recording the full screen gives you breathing room to change your mind after you’ve recorded, or use the entire video at a different size later, without having to re-record. For example, say you create a video specifically for a 320 x 240 output. Using a partial screen recorder, you’d set your window at that size, then record, then you’d have your specifically-sized video all ready to go after recording. But what if you later decide to use that video as part of a different HD project? You’ll have to re-record your video at a bigger size, or risk inserting a very low quality/low resolution video into your project. If you had captured it full screen, you would have the flexibility to crop it and create a 320×240 video, and then use that same recording at a different size in a different project, saving a lot of time and hassle.  In other words it’s creating a high resolution “master” capture that you can then export to other sizes and codecs as needed.

The arguments I’ve seen against full-screen capture mainly revolve around file size. If you’re capturing the full screen, rather than just the portion or size you need, opponents say you’re creating bigger-than-needed files wasting valuable hard drive space. In our case, ScreenFlow uses a “proprietary” very efficient compression method that enables smaller file sizes. Also, by playing with data rates, and frame rates (and even codecs) you can achieve very small file sizes with very acceptable quality. (See “ScreenGenius tip: Make your video files smaller” and “Apple H.264 vs x264 – better exports” for ideas and tips.)

Some may say they prefer partial-screen capture because that’s what they’re used to using.  OK, have fun with that, while the rest of us enjoy the freedom of full-screen capture :)

x264Encoder is an encoding engine that produces video in the H.264/AVC standard. It is free, and developed by Takashi Mochizuki. Takashi-san was kind enough to make his x264Encoder compatible with ScreenFlow. When asked why he developed the codec, Takashi explained:

“I am just an amateur, free software programmer, and I like [the] open source policy. I also like [the] QuickTime world, and want to make QuickTime more useful. I think my component may help someone easily use the x264 library in QuickTime savvy applications.”

To use the x264Encoder with ScreenFlow, you simply download it from http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/24173/x264encoder and place the component in your /Library/QuickTime folder.  Takashi has created a few simple instructional videos on his YouTube channel if you run into any trouble. When you restart ScreenFlow you will see x264Encoder as an available codec in the Export customization options.

One of our fabulous and knowledgeable users, Craig Reed, a video producer for the Berklee College of Music online school, tested the two codecs side by side and was kind enough to report his results:

“The example movie I was using for the tests was output at 960×600 at 30 fps, and involved video action zooming, and callout zooming on a detailed interface. This is a better test than just moving the mouse around on a static screen because all the screen pixels are moving/updating simultaneously at various points of the recording.  Simply moving the mouse around and dropping down menu lists is not very demanding on the codec.  So we went with a worst-case scenario.”

Here are the settings Craig used:

Apple H.264 settings:

ScreenFlow Export Preset = Web – High (Multi-pass), selected to Customize with:

Video Settings Panel:
Compression Type = Apple’s default H.264 encoder
Frame Rate = Current (ScreenFlow captures at 30 fps)
Key Frames = Every 300 (the general rule is to force a key frame every 10 seconds.  If you set this for every 1 second, or 30 frames apart, you may see noticeable pulsing in the quality.)
Frame Reordering = Checked
Encoding = Multi-pass
Data Rate = Restrict to 200 kbps

Then Craig output the same movie with the x264Encoder codec using similar video settings:

x264 settings:
ScreenFlow Export Preset = Web – High (Multi-pass), selected to Customize with:

Video Settings Panel:
Compression Type = x264Encoder
Frame Rate = Current
Key Frames = Every 300
Frame Reordering = Checked
Encoding = Multi-pass
Data Rate = Restrict to 200 kbps

x264Encoder Options Panel (Values Tab) The only changes to the defaults were:

Faster First Pass = Disabled
b_Frame_strategy = Optimal
Refs = 5
Max B = 8

Craig found the exports from x264Encoder look noticeably better than those using Apple’s H.264 encoder.

“This is about all the control you have over the Apple H.264 codec, as it does not support different AVC levels or B-Frames.  The quality difference was extremely apparent.”

As for why he chose the settings he did, Craig explains, “In the x264Encoder-specific options, I disabled Faster First Pass in order to get the most reliable information possible during the analysis pass.  Upon comparison of encoding with this set to either Disabled or Turbo2, there is little difference in the encode time, so I suggest disabling it for the best quality.

“I also read that for animations and screen movies, (where there is less difference in the image from one frame to the next, as compared to camera videos), Reference Frames should be set to the higher of the 3-5 range, and increasing the number of B-Frames to between 5 and 8 is better than the default value of 1 or 2.”

To show the difference in quality, I created my own 23-second example movie, and exported two versions using Craig’s settings. (The only difference was that these were exported at 480×300 to fit this blog).

H.264 test

(Having trouble viewing this? View in a web browser)

x264Encoder test

(Having trouble viewing this? View in a web browser)

As you can see, the one output with H.264 (top) clearly starts breaking up during the screen zoom, and on certain movements. Whereas the x264Encoder movie maintains a crisper image throughout all the movements. Craig contends he had to raise the data rate of the Apple H.264 codec to 800 kbps to achieve the same quality results as the 200 kbps with the x264Encoder. When I did this with the 23-second movie above, the size of the movie went from 856 KB to over 2.5Mb!

Craig summarizes, “These are the settings we now use on all of our screen movies.  The one variable being that if the specific ScreenFlow project requires a larger final output resolution or has more activity on screen than can be accommodated cleanly at a video data rate of 200 kbps, we will increase that 100 kbps at a time until we get a good result.  Setting the data rate to Automatic invariably creates a good movie, but with a needlessly high data rate that is overkill.  Since our audience is on the web internationally, with a wide range of connection bandwidths, we need to maintain as high a quality as possible with the lowest bandwidth necessary.”

If you want more information on the settings, Craig makes some recommendations, “If you wish to geek out on the all the possible settings in x264Encoder and their meanings, you can review a couple resources. http://mewiki.project357.com/wiki/X264_Settings has a laundry list of all the parameters and their options with suggestions; and http://www.digital-digest.com/articles/x264_options_page2.html gives meaningful explanations about the use of some of the important available options, including the difference between B-, P-, and I-Frames.  Even though it is written about the command line interface for x264, the information is still relevant and readable.”

So try it out, and let me know what you think!

Thanks to Takashi for his wonderful work and to Craig for taking the time to test the codecs and write out his results and recommendations.

(Takashi has also recently developed a wrapper component with libavcodec and libx264. For more information on this and the  x264 development team go to  http://www.videolan.org/developers/x264.html)

ADDENDUM: It’s come to my attention since writing this post that not all devices support this encoding profile. For example, x.264-encoded videos will not play on an iPhone, while H.264-encoded files work fine. So it always pays to test your final video file’s playback on your target devices.

Andy White has been regularly producing podcasts

By Andy White

About 6 months ago I purchased an SE Electronics 2200T valve condenser studio microphone. I’ll admit, it was a bit of an impulse purchase. I’d wanted to get a really good quality condenser mic for a long time; I was getting fed up of using my Shure SM58 and Samson C01U USB mics – not because they’re bad mics, I just wanted to move to the next level. The man in the shop directed me to the SE range of studio condenser mics. He showed me the two main models and explained how the valve model, yes it contains a real valve, gives a warmer, more natural sound. I had to have it. So I left the shop £300 lighter and with a new friend to play with.

As the weeks passed however, it slowly dawned on me that this mic wasn’t the best choice for my studio setup. Don’t get me wrong. This is a beautiful mic. It reproduces beautifully smooth lows. It has an exquisite midrange rendition. It has crisp, clean, highs with a depth of detail that would put an audio electron microscope to shame (if such a thing actually existed). Yes, it reproduces in startling detail anything directed at it, including the seagulls outside, the fridge, the hum from my computer, and last but not least, the echo of my voice as it bounces off the hard shiny office surfaces.

One day as I was researching how much acoustic padding for the entire office would cost, I remembered a comment Leo Laporte once made about his beloved Heil PR 40 broadcasting mic. He mentioned the word – “rejection”. Normally that is a negative word but not when talking about microphones. Rejection refers to the ability of a mic to only pick up sounds coming from the front axis and picking up sounds less from the side and behind. He also mentioned a related parameter, sensitivity. This is all to do with how rapidly the pick up falls off as the sound source is moved further away, the less sensitive, the more rapidly the fall off. I realised that a mic with strong rejection and low sensitivity is exactly what you want if you are recording in a typical office or non-studio environment.

From that point on, I started using my Shure SM58 again. Of course, the startling clarity wasn’t there, but I welcomed the return of the warm, smooth, slightly muted sound that only the SM58 can give. I also noticed that the troublesome background noise from my office was significantly less prominent. The Shure SM58 has pretty good rejection and isn’t too sensitive, it’s not as good as the Heil PR 40 by a long chalk, but nevertheless a big improvement over the SE. Here’s the technical crux of the matter. The Shure SM58 is a dynamic microphone, the SE 2200T is a condenser. Different technologies with different characteristics. Condensers typically have high sensitivity, dynamics have lower sensitivity.

With the SM58 I use a pop filter and keep my mouth very close to the mic. Doing this makes use of the “proximity effect” which boosts the bass in your voice. It also means there is a bigger difference in loudness between your voice and anything else that tries to interrupt, such as amorous seagulls outside the window. Try doing that with the SE and you’d have to deal with some serious clipping of the audio (Tip: never shout into a condenser mic).

The SE 2200T Valve Condenser is a fantastic microphone – but it’s best used in an acoustically isolated and padded recording environment. It’s not so great for the typical office or home studio. The motto? Unless you’re going to spend hundreds of dollars sound proofing and padding your recording environment, don’t make the mistake of buying an expensive condenser mic that will pick up extraneous noise, get a dynamic mic that has good rejection and isn’t too sensitive, such as the Shure SM58 or Heil PR 40.

By the way, I’m now saving up for the Heil. Anybody want a second hand SE 2200T Valve Condenser microphone, one careful owner?

For more information on Andy White and his book, visit his website.

In our day-to-day lives, we can’t control the speed of time. But in ScreenFlow, we have the POWER to control time for our viewers. One of the great features of ScreenFlow 2 is the ability to speed up and slow down clips by using the Clip Inspector.

In my opinion, most screencasts contain few critical ‘destinations’, but much of the time is spent navigating to or from these destinations. So I use the clip inspector prolifically to speed up almost all of my clips to some degree. I fully appreciate this “power” to speed up clips, which enables me to communicate MORE information in a shorter time span. If you think about it, I’m GIVING my viewers time! Pretty cool.

There are instances, though, when I want to communicate to the audience that the clip speed is not 100%. What are some good ways to do that?

Here are three simple ideas:

1. Show a stop watch ticking (either sped up or slowed down)
2. Show the second hand of a watch
3. Show a simple fast-forward button (if your clip is sped up)

Watch this 1-minute clip to see what these ideas look like in action.

(Having trouble viewing this? View in a web browser)

The Future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.  ~C.S. Lewis

Or is it?  With ScreenFlow, maybe we can change that. :)

Now that you’ve seen some of our ideas for showing the speed of time, what are some ways that you would recommend for showing the passage of time?

So, say you record your screencast at 1920 x 1080, but want to export it – keeping it at 16:9 – for a container that’s only 480 wide. How do you figure out the height your export screen should be, while also AVOIDING MATH?  Ratio does it for you!

The interface is easy enough: Download the free widget, and when you open it you’ll see there are several preset screen sizes in the top drop-down box, such as HD 1080p or Apple iPhone. Or you can choose a customized size. The top width/height numbers are your existing screen resolution. Click the lock icon to lock your ratio and type your desired export width (or height) into the lower box, and Ratio will calculate the corresponding height (or width). You can easily swap the width and height numbers by clicking on the double arrows, or use the slider to see how the dimensions change at various percentages of the original. There’s also a handy auto button that will show you the whole range of corresponding dimensions at different percentages of the original.

As a dedicated math-avoider, I find this widget incredibly handy. Let me know what you think of it.

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/32490/ratio

We are at booth #1556

Also, be sure to listen to the ScreenFlow-focused podcast interview done by Rob Griffiths from MacWorld.com featuring  our own Andy Engberson.

Have a great weekend!