UPDATE: Deadline has been extended to June 19th at 10am PDT!

As Screenflow grows in popularity so does the need for SWAG.  A few years back we had a T-shirt design contest and everyone seemed to love it!  So I am happy to announce that we are bringing it back for round two. This time around YOU will pick the winner!  After the deadline, we will choose the top three entries and post them on our Facebook page.  The design that receives the most ‘likes’, including the ‘likes’ it receives when shared, will be crowned the winner!  We are looking for a design that represents ScreenFlow in a fun, creative, attention-grabbing way.  The winner of the t-shirt contest will not only receive a free t-shirt (including credit for the design) and a $500 gift card to the Telestream store, but also the winning t-shirt design will be sold and worn at our trade shows. The $500 dollar gift card can be used to buy any of our desktop products including ScreenFlow ($99), Wirecast webcasting software ($495), Episode Encoder ($495), or any of our Flip4Mac WMV products ($29-$179). If you already have Screenflow or Episode, we can hook you up with an upgrade to the Pro level! We reserve the right to modify or refuse a design if it doesn’t meet our standards.

Here are the guidelines:

1) Create a design following the guidelines below:

Size: The size of your total design should be either:

• Horizontal: 2100 x 1800 pixels = 14″ x 12″ = 35.6 cm x 30.5 cm, or
• Vertical: 1800 x 2100 pixels = 12″ x 14″ = 30.5 cm x 35.6 cm

Resolution: 150 pixels per inch

Artwork: Your design can be color or black and white, and can contain artwork, photography, lettering, or anything you think adds to the design. We give you permission to use the ScreenFlow logo or images of the ScreenFlow interface, but any other artwork or photography must be owned by you or be copyright-free.

2) Save your design as a PNG or JPEG artwork file

3) Email your PNG or JPEG file to smteam@telestream.net by June 12^th at 10am PDT. UPDATE: Deadline has been extended to June 19th at 10am PDT!

We will announce the finalist later on the same day.

Have fun! And best of luck to all!

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OK, this one takes us back to basics. I recently had someone ask how to pan across a photo that’s larger than the canvas size. In ScreenFlow, it’s easy to do with video actions.

Check out this 1:30 video to learn how:

Using video actions is a great way to put movement into still photos!

With the video filters in ScreenFlow 4, there are some pretty cool effects that we can create directly in ScreenFlow.

Take a look at this one, created with a transition on the Edge Work filter. With this filter, I can turn a regular color clip into an artistic line drawing that transitions from very blocky to more detailed and finally to the regular camera shot.

Using Video Filters

If you haven’t tried them yet, I encourage you to check out all the new video filters. There’s Chroma key, blurs, distortion effects, color effects, stylized effects and more.

You can add any of these effects to a video clip by selecting your clip then clicking the “+” next to Video Properties > Video Filters to reveal the available filters. Select a filter and click “Add”. Once you’ve added your filter, you can adjust its parameters (if applicable) in the Filter property box that appears.

Adding transitions to the effects

What you’ll find is that when you add these filters they apply to the whole clip. So what if you want to add a transition effect to the appearance of the filter?

For example, what if I want a clip to slowly go from normal to a blurred or stylized look? We can do that by using Video Actions.

Here are the steps to create a transition effect on a Video filter:

1. Add a video filter effect to your clip and set the parameters of that effect to what you want it to look like when it starts (in the guitar clip above, I chose “Edge Work” and set the radius to 3)
2. Place your scrubber somewhere on the clip and , with clip selected, hit “Add Video Action”
3. With your cursor at the end of the Video Action box,  change the parameters of the effect to what you want it to look like at the end of the action. (in the guitar clip, I changed the radius to less than 1.)

By adding the video action, you tell the effect to ‘transition’ from the parameters at the beginning (a radius of 3) to the parameters at the end (a radius of less than 1).

Watch this quick 1:30 minute video to see how I made the effect on the guitar video above.

This can also be a creative way to transition a clip or a logo into your video. Take a look at these examples – silly, I know… but fun to make :) :

Do you have some creative ways you’ve been using the Video Filter effects in ScreenFlow 4? If so, include a link in the comments below. We’d love to see them!

With great fanfare and celebration, we are happy to announce the release of ScreenFlow 4.0.3 on both our website and on the Mac App Store.

With this release, we’ve fixed nearly 50 niggling bugs, including:

• The inability to export to Windows Media using the Mac App Store version of ScreenFlow
• A bug where splitting a clip removed a transition
• …plus a few crashes that would occur in certain systems under certain circumstances.

For a complete list of changes in this release, view our release notes.

We continue to fight the good fight, eradicating bugs, and making ScreenFlow ever more stable and reliable.

I want to thank all our wonderful customers for taking the time to report and help us diagnose some of these issues.

Enjoy 4.0.3 and keep making great ScreenFlows!

In ScreenFlow 4, due to popular demand, we implemented a new shortcut feature that allows you to zoom in and out of the preview canvas by using your mouse scroll wheel or a pinch/zoom motion on your trackpad.

In our latest 4.0.2 release, we’ve updated that feature (also due to popular demand). This new updated adds the ability to resize items on your preview canvas by pressing command and using the scroll wheel, or pinch/zoom.

Watch this quick 1 minute video to see how it’s done:

In this short video, I will show you how to create a the 3D text effect used most famously by George Lucas in his Star Wars intros, like the one pictured here.

In summary, the steps are:

1) Create a text box and put it into a nested timeline

2) Add a video action to scroll the text from bottom to top

3) On the main timeline add an X Rotation to the nested clip

4) Adjust and enjoy!

We’ve had a lot of questions about our new Mp4 web export format in ScreenFlow 4, so I thought I’d take a little space here to explain in depth what changed, why, and what some of the settings mean.

What changed and why?

As  a quick overview: the ScreenFlow 4 Web-High and Web-Low encoding presets now use the x264 codec to encode to H.264 video format, wrapped in an MP4 container. (As a comparison, ScreenFlow 3 presets used the Apple H.264 codec to encode H.264 format, and wrapped it in a .MOV container).

What are Codecs?

Codecs are like translators; they tell the program and hardware how to encode and decode a file for optimal viewing. (The word ‘codec’ literally comes from a contraction of COmpressor-DECompressor (or COder-DECoder). ) The goal of most lossy video codecs is to compress the data enough to keep file sizes low, while not sacrificing too much image quality.

Apple H.264 and x264 are just two of the available codec implementations that encode to the H.264 compression standard. X264 is considered by many (including us!) to be the best choice in terms of quality and file size for the H.264 file it renders. Moscow State University, Graphics & Media Lab Video Group, an authority on compression, tested and verified that x264 is the best choice in terms of quality and file size for the H.264 file it renders. Here’s a report of their most recent comparison of various H.264 codecs. (If you really want to geek out, here’s MSU’s full report. They do this test every year.)

What is a container?