Live screen capture

I have seen it done and would like to know how it is done for a piece of work that i am doing, basically, like in the various online tutorials how do you output and record what you are doing on your monitor. ie: for demo of software

Some friends have made some new software and they want me to produce a dvd of the software being used but i dont want to point my camera at a monitor.

Hope this makes sense, thanks. All replies greatfully received!

Chris.

Ambrosia Software's SnapzPro. One of my favourite pieces of software. Impressed one client a great deal when I used it to do a "website navigation" portion for a marketing video.

[www.AmbrosiaSW.com]


www.derekmok.com

Thanks derek, you are to the rescue once again!

Since this has been brought up, I'm going to go ahead and ask something that I haven't been able to figure out. When I use this program, I get a great looking Quicktime file (800 x 600 captured area with the Photo-JPEG codec), but once I throw the clip on the timeline, the image looks awful on an external monitor. The picture looks jumpy and illegible and the colors all seem blown out, but it looks okay in the canvas. Not only that, I can't view the sequence on the external monitor when I play through the timeline. Strypes gave me a ton of help with this issue last week, but I just can't seem to resolve it. I've matched the sequence to the 800x600 size, made sure pixels were square, etc... and it still looks like garbage on the external monitor.

Since we're on the topic of SnapzPro, does anyone think there's a step that I'm just missing or some other mistake in the process?

> once I throw the clip on the timeline, the image looks awful on an external monitor

Interesting issue. I had it as well the last time I had to edit with SnapzPro clips, and I was using a less complicated codec which matches the Sequence Settings (DV NTSC). In my case, I was working with a larger frame size (around 1000x700, to capture a webpage and mouse interactions) but at the correct frame rate (29.97fps).

What I do know is that once you render the clip, it plays just fine with no quality issues. But real-time display before rendering was unusable -- not only did I get just still frames, the Viewer and external monitor weren't even showing the right frame where the playhead was. It made editing and especially motion keyframing a real pain. So I opted to render the whole thing before trying to work with it.

Strangely enough, I just tested this again on my home system with another abnormal-sized clip -- 598x447px, H.264 codec in MP4 format, 15fps, not originally intended for editing -- in another DV NTSC timeline, and while I got a green render bar, there were no issues with the Viewer or external monitor showing the wrong image. The differences between my home system and the aberrant machine are the Kona 2 capture card on the aberrant machine, and that my home system is FCP5 while the aberrant one was FCP6.

I'd be interested in finding out why as well. I couldn't nail down the cause. SnapzPro does offer the option of screen-capturing at a fixed frame size (eg. you can force the capture area to stay at 720x480) if you so choose.


www.derekmok.com

> real-time display before rendering was unusable -- not only did I get just still frames, the Viewer and external monitor weren't even showing the right frame where the playhead was.

This is what happened even after rendering. I'm working on a training video, so I finally decided to distribute it as a flash based video to be viewed on a computer (where it looks far better than an external monitor). It would just be nice to find out what I was doing wrong and get it on DVD as well.

Thanks for your help Derek (and Strypes!)...