Record & Edit Demos with Ecamm Live & Screenflow
I've wanted to write this down for awhile, but haven't had time to do it justice, so here's a draft. Update (May): I recorded a quick video that highlights this workflow below:
15m video on how to Record Demos with Ecamm Live
One workflow for me that has stood the test of time for recording and editing demos, screencasts, and other videos, is Ecamm Live & Screenflow.
Is Ecamm Live expensive? Yes, I pay for it monthly. Is it worth it? Also yes.
I use Ecamm Live for a bunch of live things. It even provides a software based alternative to the Blackmagic ATEM Mini Pro ISO I wanted since it was launched, but here I am focused specifically on the recording workflow.
The absolute winning feature for Ecamm Live is the ability to record the current window, and specifically "Current Application", as a dynamic window switcher.
OBS is free and cross platform. It's a wonderful piece of software, and I've tried to use it for this. It's not as good. And I do this a lot. If you want a more heavy duty editing solution, I suggest Davinci Resolve which is both cross platform and has a free version.
Screenflow only lets you record a portion of a screen, and that's a huge disadvantage for reasons I may enumerate later. Its output videos are also much larger than you want to have to deal with and store regularly.
A trick with Ecamm Live is to setup one scene for "Current Application" and second to a specific "Home" window that you manually switch to, and optionally switch to another window manually within that scene.
Then, you take these 1080p (or 4K) .mp4 files and edit them via Screenflow, which still provides a very nice workflow for editing and exporting the videos. We even use Screenflow for editing things like podcasts. It's great.
Together you get the best solution I've found for recording and editing on macOS.
I'm curious if other folks do this, or if they have found similar solutions out in the wild!
PS: just to confirm, I receive no consideration for talking about anything in this post. This is just a workflow I find very useful.