Product Reviews

ScreenFlow is an application for recording screencasts, designed to greatly simplify the task of marrying up screen, video, and audio segment recording and editing.

Screencasts are an excellent way of demonstrating applications or particular tasks or workflows, but assembling the separate elements and editing them into a coherent single whole can be tricky.

ScreenFlow brings this assembly process into a single window, offering iMovie-like simplicity of editing.

A new screencast recording can be started using a menubar control or a hot key. As with any demonstration, it's a good idea to plan your script and actions in advance, but ScreenFlow's simplicity helps here - it's very easy to make rough drafts of your screencast which you can instantly replay to see what needs revision.

By default, ScreenFlow records the entire screen, and will record video from your iSight camera, audio from your built-in or external microphone, and audio produced by the computer as an optional extra. (This requires installation of an extra driver, which is done via a single click in the preferences pane.)

Once your recording is finished, it opens in ScreenFlow's editor, which is where you can start perfecting it. The app uses the concept of Actions, which can be applied to either the screen, video or audio recording. Select the media to which the

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action will be applied, then adjust its parameters in the control panel to the right. For example, you might want the screencast to zoom in on a particular control widget or text box, so that the viewer gets a clear view of how things work. First mark the position of this action, then adjust the zoom and position of the video so that it zooms in to the right part of the screen at the right time.

There are plenty of options available. The screen recording is the most important of the media available, and it can be zoomed, rotated, reflected, and given extra shadow against any background. Video from your iSight can be treated in exactly the same way.

Audio actions are limited to volume and mute controls, but that's sufficient for most needs when recording a screencast. Screen recording properties bring some useful automation: your mouse pointer can be zoomed throughout the recording, and a useful 'radar' special effect applied to all mouse clicks, so viewers are shown exactly what is being clicked on.

The most attractive thing about ScreenFlow's approach of recording everything and letting you edit it afterwards is that it reduces the number of recording takes required. You can edit out mistakes, and play around with the media actions so that everything looks professional.

Screencast recordings can be exported using a number of presets, although even these are customisable to the extent where the compression type, frame rate, sound bit rate and other settings can be adjusted to your needs. Some filters and special effects can also be applied to the entire recording, if deemed necessary. The exported files are perfect for web streaming; the default export settings offer a good balance between image quality, clarity and file size.

At £65, ScreenFlow is priced fractionally beyond the means of the casual home user, but it's a good investment for any software developer wanting to demonstrate Mac products online.