Ever since Rebecca explained how to create a screencast in OS X, I’ve been messing with Snapz X Pro. The only real problem I have with it is that the resulting files (.mov) are huge. There are a few compression/save as options and I will review them, but I’ve found it much easier to take the resulting files and convert them using ffmpegX, a free audio/video conversion tool. This tutorial will take you through the steps to convert .mov files to Flash.
- If you don’t have it installed already, download and install ffmpegX.
- Open Snapz X Pro and select Preferences. Click the Settings button in the Include Video Track section.
- You’ll notice a number of output formats - but none of them are Flash. You can use H.264 for better compression (better than .mov) - but the resulting file can still be too large for web streaming (especially for folks not using a very fast broadband connection). Leaving Animation as the default will result in a large file, but that file can be heavily compressed (the point of this tutorial) without much loss in quality.
- Return to the Preferences screen, and this time click the Settings button in the Include Microphone Track section. Note: this tutorial assumes you are in fact including audio recorded from your microphone in your screencast.
From here you can change the default audio format, but again, the default is ideal. However, you may want to change Mono to Stereo for better sound.
- Once you’ve recorded your screencast with Snapz X Pro, launch ffmpegX. Click the Open button from the upper left corner.
- Navigate to the .mov file you created with Snapz X Pro, select it and click Choose.
- The default Target Format will likely be set to AVI DivX, but that’s not what we’ll want to use.
- So click the small arrow next to AVI DivX and select FLV (Flash Video) from the pull-down menu.
- The default Flash settings aren’t ideal, so we’ll make a few quick changes. Click the Video tab.
- In the Video parameters section, you will almost certainly want to change the Video Size, as it’s unlikely that it actually matches your source (.mov) video file. Enter the appropriate size in the spaces provided. If you’re not sure what video resolution you recorded in using Snapz X Pro, navigate to the .mov you created, select it by clicking it once, and then hit Apple Key+i to get the file information.
- In the More Info section of the File Info pane, look for the Dimensions. That’s the video size you’ll want to specify in ffmpegX.
- Back in ffmpegX, select the Audio tab. Use .MP3 as the Audio Codec. You might want to increase the Audio bitrate slightly, but not too high - if your audio track is just your voice recorded through your microphone, there’s no need to have very very high quality audio.
When everything is set to your liking, click the Encode button.
- The length of time it takes to encode your video will depend on the video size and length. I used a 41 second, 43.4MB movie file, and it encoded in about 15 seconds.
- Once completed, locate your newly created .flv (flash) file. Notice the huge difference in file size (mine went from 43.4MB to 2.5MB). You can play your flash file in your browser, or a video player like VLC if you have it installed. Note that the quality will have decreased slightly from the original .mov, but not significantly. And the huge decrease in file size more than makes up for the slight quality loss.
- That’s it - you’re done. Next up will be a screencast on how to embed your Flash video into a WordPress blog.
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