Screen Recording

QuickTime is the go to app on the Mac for screen recording, it also allows you to record you as well, as a Movie, and the resolution is higher than you will get if you use PhotoBooth, but this is precisely why I advise using PhotoBooth for 'talking head' videos, nice and simple, and with video that is a suitable size for sharing online without having to resize it. Quicktime allows you to record your screen with/without audio, and then to trim it at the end before saving it.

Top Tip:

Countdown from 3 before you start talking, it's easy to trim at the end, and there's nothing more annoying than having been rabbiting for five minutes only to discover the first 3 words from your sentence are missing....

Picture in Picture

Many teachers like to include a little thumbnail of the face in the corner of the screen during the screen recording, this is not the default setting in QuickTime, but there is a simple workaround to set this up in QuickTime....

  1. The trick is to set up QuickTime to do two things at the same time…. display your face using the New Movie Recording, then record the screen at the same time:

  2. Start a new Movie (to record/capture your face) and choose View > Float on Top. But don't actually bother recording, just leave it displaying your beautiful face, you can resize, reposition the camera where you want it to go.... but no need to actually record, just leave it displaying your face…

  3. Then start a new whole screen recording (File > New Screen Recording)…. BOOM


Note

This technique won’t work if anything is fullscreen, ie presentations, so you’ll need to adjust to present within a window, not full screen. Presenter or rehearsal mode should work fine for this, eg Google Slides:Click the drop down, and choose 'presenter view' instead, so you can present, NOT in full screen:


Or click present as you normally do, but then click the Full screen toggle icon next to the gear wheel (hover at the bottom of the screen) to switch off full screen….


Doing this on iPad is a little more tricky... but not impossible.

QuickTime Picture in Picture.mov

Alternatives...

There are other apps out there that are dedicated to screen recording, and the option to have the 'picture in picture' view are backed right in, arguable more 'polished' than the QuickTime workaround described above.

What they tend to have in common is

  • they are browser based

  • require you to set up and account

  • are generally not free*

  • allow you to annotate over the screen while recording

  • allow you include your face 'picture in picture'

*so you'll either have to pay up, or work within the constraint of their free/basic plans, which they do offer as promotions from time to time....

The jury is out on which is the best, but two definitely worth considering are:

Loom

You will need to edit the settings to turn off flip video if you want any writing you show on screen to be legible, the settings you need to change are here.

Screencastify




Flipgrid Screen Recording

Last but not least, Flipgrid have added a screen recording option, when you add a video, just click the 3 dots... this is free, you can sign in with Google, and it includes a picture in picture option... but it's quite laggy in my experience, and doesn't come with any other bells and whistles like screen annotation or anything... but it's free!