Tour 3– Exporting Your Screencast

The purpose of this tour is to familiarize you with exporting your screencast. Screencast projects are not video files – they are saved as Screenflow documents (with a screenflow extension), which can only be opened and used by ScreenFlow.

There are two ways to publish your screencasts – by exporting them to a standard video file format (QuickTime or Windows Media) or publishing them directly to an Internet video service, like YouTube.

Determining the correct export settings for your screencast depends on the complexity of your screencast and the intended use of the video after it has been produced.

This tour explores the basics of ScreenFlow’s export options. For a comprehensive description, see Publishing Your Screencast.

Select File > Export or press Command-E to export your presentation:

Figure 10. Export Settings Window

Save As. Choose a name for your exported video (default: ScreenFlow.mov).

Where. Choose a location to export your video.

Preset. ScreenFlow has several export presets for your convenience. This tour focuses on the most commonly used presets. For more information, see Preset.

•	Web - High. This is the default export option which encodes using the H.264 codec. It was chosen as the default codec based on both image quality and file size.

•	Web - Low. This is an export option similar to Web - High, but formatted for a low bandwidth. It plays more smoothly on slow internet connections but the image quality is not as good as Web - High.

•	Lossless. This is an uncompressed export format ideal for additional editing. This format has the highest quality image but also the largest file size. When exported at 100%, the image quality is identical to the original recording.

iPad / iPhone / Apple TV / iPod. These export options are formatted based on the recommended video specifications for these devices. They cannot be altered.

Windows Media. This option exports a video in the WMV format. This is a popular format for Windows users. This option uses a QuickTime plugin called Flip4Mac which must be licensed separately.

Dimensions

These options are used to set the dimensions of your video export. You should not set a size larger that your canvas size. This does not improve image quality.

Scale by. Use this option to scale your project by a percentage value. This is an easy way to shrink your screencast while maintaining the aspect ratio.

Scale to custom size. Use this option to set the exact width and height of your exported video. Click the Letterbox Content box to add letterboxing to your export.

Publish to YouTube/Vimeo/Flash

In addition to encoding a video file, ScreenFlow can also publish screencasts directly to YouTube, Vimeo, and Flash. These options are accessible from the File menu.

For more information, see Publishing to YouTube, Publishing to Vimeo, and Publishing to Flash.