Learning the World » Usability Testing

Screenflow: Screen Capture Test (Mac)

Kenneth Newquist — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 16:47:21 +0000

Here’s my test of audio/video screen capture using ScreenFlow, in which I use Google to find Waldo. It was recorded on a Mac OS X 10.5 machine with a Logitech Desktop Microphone.

The final Quicktime video is 960×600 pixels (about 50% of the original screen size) It is 1.04 minutes long, and 7.7 MB in size. I used the “Web – High” setting (H.264 video encoding at 850 kbits/sec. AAC sterio audio at 96 kbits/sec). The original video was full-screen; I didn’t attempt to do a full-size export.

Observations: ScreenFlow offers a lot more options than Silverback. For example, when doing the capture I could choose which of my Mac’s iSight cameras I wanted to use (the MacBook Pro’s built in iSight or the one on my external monitor) as well as which monitor to use (the MacBook’s or the external one). It includes 11 export options, and a number of video tweaking options within the program, including the ability to move/resize the picture-in-picture video and the ability to add on-screen text. I like Silverback for its fire-and-forget nature, but I think ScreenFlow offers us more long-term flexibility.

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Silverback: Screen Capture Test (Mac)

Kenneth Newquist — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 20:43:32 +0000

Here’s my test of audio/video screen capture using Silverback, in which I use Google to find Waldo. It was recorded on a Mac OS X 10.5 machine with a Logitech Desktop Microphone.

The final Quicktime video is 468×300 pixels (about 25% of the original screen size) It is 1.01 minutes long, and 19.22 MB in size. The original video was full-screen, and far larger in size: about 120 mb, but there are export settings that can reduce that size considerably.

Observations: Silverback was very easy to configure and use. I assume the large file sizes are because it’s capturing both the on-screen video and video of the user, coupled with a high screen resolution my Mac. It records as Quicktime, which PowerPress was able to play back in Firefox and Internet Explorer without any problems.

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Camstudio: Screen Capture Test (Windows)

Kenneth Newquist — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 10:30:38 +0000

Here’s my test of audio/video screen capture using Camstudio, in which I use Google to find Waldo.

This was done on a Windows XP machine running Camstudio 2.0. The audio was recorded using a Logitech Desktop Microphone. The final video uses the Intel Indeo Video 4.5 codec.

The AVI video full-screen, 1.05 minutes long and 7.46 MB in size.

Observations: The video recorded well and plays back fine in Windows Media Player. Embedding it on a webpage using PowerPress (the video below) was more problematic. IE 6 will play the video because it recognizes the AVI file type. Firefox 3 will not.

The video looks good and the sound quality is fine. I don’t think the inability to play AVI files in Firefox is a show stopper, and we can always convert AVIs to some other format later on if we need to.

Download the video (AVI format)