I hope you had a nice weekend! I went to a tradeshow showing and talking about Getting Things Done. Sunny and a lot of people. I also configured a RoadWarrior VPN but more about that another day. 

Today I will start a theme related to how you can do screen recordings or explainer videos. I do them from time to time and learned what you can do and what you shouldn’t do. Sometimes the easy way and sometime the hard way. And I still do learn a lot… 

Today I wanted to talk a bit about a tool called ScreenFlow from Tellestream. It is a paid application ($149) - it is updated often and for every main update a new license needs to be purchased - an upgrade license is cheaper ($49). I have bought a license at least 3 times. ScreenFlow was one of the first video recording applications I used. It is powerful and you can use it from recording, to edit and to export and publishing.

It is nice since it can record your desktop (or parts of it), your camera, your ipad and your audio at once and what to se, when etc. So for example you can start your edit with your camera in full screen. Do an intro presentation, then you can cut in your intro, back to camera, zoom out and show your screen. Easy to change sizes, zoom in - add effects etc. 

It takes a bit to learn but it is not particular difficult. I spent a few hours on YouTube watching tutorials and introductions to it and after that it became my goto video editor for years. I still use it from time to time when I do recordings mainly because it is fast to capture multiple sources fast and it will do most of the necessary edits. 

The part where it is a bit weak is audio threatment. I usually export the sound - bring it into Audition or Audacity where I level and sound threat it.  I can also do noise removal and reverb treatment.  I finally will import it back into ScreenFlow.

One thing that I ran into the other day - also sound related. I did an almost 30min recording on friday. Today I had planned to edit it to be released today as well. But there was something strange with the sound. It sounded strange. It started in sync with the video but quickly  got out of sync. There was also strange pops and miss sounds in the audio. The audio stopped way before the video.

It took me quite some time to understand what was happening. I recorded the sound with my Zoom H8 as an audio device - it does that in 48khz sample rate. That it the most common audio sample rate for video. But ScreenFlow recorded it as it where 44khz. If it is a bug with screenflow or a setting issue in MacOS I am nut sure. But it ended up with me not being able to use the recording. 

Lessons learned. When you do recordings (of any type) - do a test recording first so that you are certain it works as it should