Setting Up a Screen Capture
Thursday, October 28, 2010 at 8:00AM note: This post is being cross published on Screen Flow's(the application I've been using to capture the videos) blog, the Screening Room.
I recently started answering a few questions by doing screen recordings showing the step by step instructions. This was a much quicker way for me to answer the question and much easier way of sharing the information than screenshots combined with lots of copy explaining the process (which is also fairly tedious to put together). The response was very positive, but immediately spawned a whole series of questions around best practices for encoding screen capture video.
To keep the ball rolling, I thought I'd answer those questions via video as well! But before I can talk about good encode settings, I thought it best to review some tips for setting up your computer to improve the eventual quality of your finished encode. I explain it in more detail in the video, but the highlight are:
Start with a clean desktop - remove all the extraneous icons and dock from the screen, as well as close any web browser windows or other elements you don't want to include in the recording. In the video I do this manually by switching to a new Spaces screen on my mac and moving the files on my desktop to a temporary folder. I neglected to mention Screen flow has a handy feature allowing you to hide all the icons on your desktop (just click the little camera icon in the menu bar and choose hide desktop)- Change your background - busy desktop images are fun to look at while you are working, but add unneeded complexity to the encode, so switch your wallpaper to a single color (i use neutral grey) while capturing.
- Change screen resolution to 1280 x 800 - my screen resolution is typically 2560x1600; if I tried to capturing at this size and then present it on the web, all my windows and icons would be so small you'd need a microscope to see them! 1280x800 is the closest native monitor resolution to 720p (1280x720) so I tend to choose it for the purposes of capturing. I like to keep to monitor native resolutions for capturing when possible. First off, its just easier to do (no need to root through custom settings in the display panel) but also some applications look and work better in full screen mode if your sticking with the screen native aspect ratio. Then when I edit and encode, I have two options - I can either crop the video slightly (by 80 pixels vertically) to achieve my 16:9 aspect ratio or i can allow the video to encode with slight pillar bars (two vertical black bars on either side of the monitor image) to keep it at the appropriate aspect ratio. Both work and we'll compare how they look in the final encode in my next post.
Setting Up a Capture from Andy Beach on Vimeo.
In my next post we'll look at what encode settings to use to get the best quality encode for your finished screen capture movie.
On a side note, I worked for a company in New York City that produced how to videos for topics like editing in Final Cut Pro and using Photoshop about five years ago. It's funny how much the technology has changed in just that short time. When we were doing those productions (sometimes as much as a 10 hour video on a single topic) the screen recording tools we had to use were quite different and not nearly as feature rich as Screen Flow. Even in the short time I've been working with it after my long hiatus doing screen capture, I've found several little tricks I wish i'd had access to back then - and I'm sure those of you more familiar with the product will point out even more I've missed along the way.
Screen Flow, Telestream, how to in How To 
