ScreenFlow Concepts: Easy Video Editing for Professional Screencasts

ScreenFlow Concepts

Easy Video Editing for Professional Screencasts

by

Jose John

(c) 2015 Jose John. All rights reserved.

Contents

Introduction

Concept 1: Always Start with the End in Mind

Concept 2: Everything is a Video Clip

Concept 3: Animate using Video Actions

Concept 4: Screen Recording Clips have depth

Concept 5: Guide the Viewer's Eye with Callouts

The Workflow

Next Steps

Introduction

ScreenFlow is a popular application on Mac OS X for capturing the screen and creating a movie. These movies can be used for both marketing and instructional purposes. What sets ScreenFlow apart from other screen capturing software is that it provides an integrated solution for both capturing and editing the movie to create high-quality output. Indeed, many professionals who create video tutorials prefer the ScreenFlow application to improve their workflow and to have tighter control over the production process. ScreenFlow has been optimized to create screencasts on Mac OS X.

ScreenFlow is a complicated piece of software. Not only does it capture the screen, but it also provides several video editing tools so that we can create a professional screencast. In a good production, the viewer’s eye must be guided through the many busy elements on the screen so that the instruction or the marketing message can be easily understood. ScreenFlow provides many tools to guide the viewer’s eye and offers flexibility so that you, the producer, enjoys fine creative control over the screencast.

When we ask ScreenFlow to start recording, it will capture the full screen. Once it has stopped recording, we can crop the video to select only a portion of the screen which we would like to convert into a movie. At the most basic level we would want to use trimming functions so that we can edit out any mistakes. Once we have cleaned up the obvious errors, we can export to a movie file on disk by specifying settings for compression and video size, or simply use an inbuilt export preset.

The two fundamental user interface (UI) elements in ScreenFlow are the timeline and the canvas. The timeline allows us to sequence the video clips in order from beginning to end and from top to bottom. The video clips that appear higher in the timeline cover up the video clips that appear towards the bottom. We can see the exact composition at any point in time on the canvas. The canvas always displays the composition at the location of the playhead.

When we start putting the screencast together, the first step will be to record the screen. This will give us the first video clip for the timeline. We can continue to make recordings and add them to the same ScreenFlow project. Each of these recordings will show up as additional video clips in the media panel. We can drag these clips onto the timeline and