![]() ![]() In this example, we have a number of different audio sources including the internal microphone of the Mac, and have selected an external microphone. To record your screencast:ġ) Select File > New Screen Recording from the QuickTime Player menu.Ģ) Set your sound source by clicking the pop-up menu next to the red record button (see screenshot below): (Setting the audio source for a screen recording.) In many computer-related screencasts, this means that you’re just going to close or hide as many open windows as possible on the Mac, leaving the app or apps you’re demonstrating in plain view. Now we need to get the main window ready to record. Although this is a movie recording window, we’re never going to click the record button - instead, we’re just going to use that window as a way to show the narrator talking. This makes the narrator big enough to see, but not so large that he or she doesn’t dominate the screen. That means that the narrator window is going to take up a full quarter of the recorded scene! Grab one lower corner of the narrator window and drag it diagonally upward to resize the window to take up only about 1/8th of the full display (640 x 360 pixels). For example, the default “movie recording” screen on a 27-inch iMac is 1280 x 720 pixels (720p FaceTime HD camera) on a display that’s 5120 x 2880 pixels in size. Make sure that your narrator is properly lit - having the narrator in front of a window, for example, will usually result in a poorly lit scene with the narrator in silhouette against a bright background.The best way to combat this type of lighting issue is to simply move the Mac - easy if it’s a MacBook, not so easy if it’s an iMac…Ĥ) Resize the narrator window so that it doesn’t dominate the entire computer screen. By default, this turns on the FaceTime camera that is built into most Macs and opens a live window showing the computer user. Click the Done button as we don’t need to open an existing document.ģ) Select File > New Movie Recording from the QuickTime Player menu. It turns out that QuickTime Player has the perfect tool for doing that.ġ) Launch QuickTime Player from the Applications Folder.Ģ) A standard Mac “open” dialog appears. What we’re going to need for our narrated video is a small window showing the narrator talking about what’s happening on the main computer screen. Here’s how!Ĭapturing a Screencast With QuickTime Player While those apps also include tools for adding titles, transitions, annotation (like highlighting a cursor click) and so on, the majority of the screencasting capture process can be done with QuickTime Player. (Screencast window, with narrator at right, subject window at left.)ĭedicated screencasting apps provide a way to capture two or more streams of video, then overlay them so that the narration window is visible in one corner or the other, out of the way of the action that’s taking place on the computer screen. It’s almost like having a live instructor telling you how to do something, and much more effective than just hearing a disembodied voice intoning words while you watch the screen. ![]() ![]() A tried-and-true format for screencasts is to capture the computer screen while a task is being performed, with a “talking head” window showing the narrator describing what’s going on (see screenshot below). Screencasts are perfect for teaching a large audience how to do something, which is why YouTube is chock-full of screencasts showing how to fix photos with various photography apps, how to use pivot tables in Excel, and a million other things. We’re offering this article as part of our buildup to the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show in Las Vegas, April 7-12, 2018. There are a lot of apps that can make screencasting easy, but many of them are also quite expensive! In this article, I’ll demonstrate one simple way to record your own screencasts with an app that’s already on your Mac - QuickTime Player. Have you ever been tempted to make your own screencasts? They’re usually video tutorials of some sort, showing how to perform a task on a Mac while a narrator provides explanations of what’s going on. ![]()
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