Quality of screencast recordings on OS X

[TrippyLighting]

Gripe #1 of the day.

I've noticed that the video quality of my own screencasts and other users at also clearly use a mac is not nearly as crisp as those recorded on the Windows platform. I've grown accustomed to shrink Fusion 360 down to a 1920 x 1080 resolution and record screencasts like that but the video quality still is dismal.

In contrast, when I record for YouTube using ScreenFlow things are crisp and sharp. Both of the following screencasts were done in response to threads here on the forum.

This one was done with Screencast:

And this one with Screenflow and then published right from the Tool to Youtube

[brianrepp]

Agree - I sent a note to the Screencast crew about this one, let's see what they say!

[TrippyLighting]

Thanks again. BTW, I don't think that's always been the case.

[HughesTooling]

@brianrepp I've noticed the latest version seems more power hungry on a PC, the fan on my notebook comes on at full speed after about 20 seconds. I don't remember it coming on that quickly before, even in the summer when it was 8-10°C hotter.

Mark

[Phil.E]

Hopefully the Screencast team can address these differences.

Here's one way to deal with it.

I normally test on large monitors. When I need to make a screencast it helps to drag the Fusion window to the smallest possible size. Screencast can fix the aspect ratio of Fusion at any size. So what I wind up with is the difference below.

These are recorded on the same Mac, large app window vs small. The images are taken from the recordings as played on another monitor.

[brianrepp]

Just spoke to the Screencast team, and as @Phil.E points out, the default res for capture is 1280x800, so makes sense that your trick works Phil.  The Screencast team is looking into bumping up the capture resolution, but otherwise capture on Mac and PC should be the same.

As for performance toll on your machine, I'm told the biggest change in the last update was to offer the ability to re-record audio after the Screencast has been recorded. One of the features added was to draw the audio waveform. There can be some performance issues in terms of drawing the waveform when in zoomed in state as we process a lot of sample data to draw the waveform. But, during the initial recording itself, there shouldn't be anything that dramatically puts more strain on your machine.

[TrippyLighting]

Thanks for the feedback.

1280x800, really ? My iPhone has a higher resolution 😕

I don't know anyone who does CAD that works not at least on a 1920 x 1080 monitor.

The screencast tool is able to size the Fusion 360 screen size to the correct aspect ratio. It should really be no problem for it to size Fusion 360 to a set of predefined oder even user defined settings.

That would also allow to upload screencasts in better quality to youtube.