Screen highlights and special effects with OmniDazzle
Occasionally I will come across a free application that offers something that might be useful for ScreenFlow users. A few weeks ago, I wrote about “Ratio” the free widget that helps calculate standard screen sizes (I use that one all the time). My most recent discovery is OmniDazzle – a free program that lets you highlight certain areas of your screen, create special effects, and track the location of your mouse pointer.
ScreenFlow already offers some very powerful options for highlighting your mouse, and highlighting a foreground window. But occasionally, I have a need to highlight a square area of my screen, and the mouse highlight doesn’t quite work for it. OmniDazzle lets you choose a shape and highlight or “cut out” an area you want to highlight. As you highlight, the rest of the screen darkens, making your desired highlight very visible. This is just one of the many cool little effects and highlights you can do with OmniDazzle.
Take a look at this short video to see just a few of the capabilities of OmniDazzle.
(Having trouble viewing this? View in a web browser)
OmniDazzle is free, and offered by a company called OmniGroup. I found it fairly easy to jump in and figure out how to use, though there is a help file if needed.
Do you have any free or inexpensive products you use to enhance your ScreenFlow presentations? If so, let me know.
8 Responses to “Screen highlights and special effects with OmniDazzle”
March 11th, 2010 at: 10:07 am
This is soo cool. I wanted something like Mouseposé for work, but free. This is awesome!
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March 18th, 2010 at: 3:09 pm
A while back, I entered an enhancement request for something like “gen-lock video.” That’s the technology that sports commentators use in replay analyses to show the audience how a certain tactic is supposed to work and how it was actually executed. Cool stuff if we could get that into ScreenFlow post processing.
So, when I saw this piece, a light bulb went off. Why not use “scribble” in OmniDazzle to simulate this effect? I tried it out and it sorta worked. Maybe its just a matter of practice. I did find that playing a movie at half speed in QuickTime & Player helped. After all, we can speed that up again in Screenflow.
I’m sticking by my feature request but this was fun to try. YMMV so give it a shot and see what can be done.
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Lynn Elliott Reply:
March 18th, 2010 at 3:13 pm
Good idea Frank. You could certainly use the “scribble” effect in OmniDazzle to circle something on screen that you’re talking about – just as a different way to highlight it. Thanks for bringing this usage to light.
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March 19th, 2010 at: 10:07 am
OmniDazzle is a great complement to ScreenFlow! Scraster uses it tons in our work for the purpose of highlighting screen area that you mention in your post. It’s worth noting that within OmniDazzle’s settings, one can customize the style of the rectangular/odd shaped highlight (with regard to border and background opacity) to match the style of his/her ScreenFlow mouse callout. The TimeBridge/Evernote video we recently produced is a great example of this. ( see youtube /watch?v=DMLnbhmaJHQ )
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Lynn Elliott Reply:
March 19th, 2010 at 10:48 am
Thanks scraster. And that’s a nice example of usage
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMLnbhmaJHQ)
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April 22nd, 2010 at: 7:54 am
Is there something like this for Windows?
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June 24th, 2010 at: 7:27 pm
I tried Omnidazzle on my iMac and figured that this was just what I needed as a presentation tool. I scribble on-screen to point out things to my class. Bought a new MacBook Pro 15″. I am totally gutted that Omnidazzle will not work on this…..Any hope that Omnidazzle will be updated? I cannot find any tool that comes close to Omnidazzle!
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Lynn Elliott Reply:
June 25th, 2010 at 8:07 am
HI Harry,
I’m sorry to hear that. I don’t have any insight as to why Omnidazzle wouldn’t work on your new computer. I suggest you contact that company’s support. http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnidazzle/support/
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