Today I’m going to answer one of your questions about screen capture programs.

  • Which ones are good?
  • Which ones aren’t?
  • Which ones do I recommend?

TheMishap7074 wrote and asked this”

  • “Tim, I would like to know what kind of program YouTubers use for screen capture videos. Thank you, always all the great information.”

Personally, the only two screen capture programs that I’ve really ever used– and the first one is just the free one that comes on a Mac along with QuickTime.

It’s free, so all you’ve got to do is open QuickTime on your computer, and go to a new screen recording, select which area of the screen you want to record, and then just simply hit record, and it will just screen capture that part of your monitor while you do whatever it is you want to do inside that screen capture. So I used that for a while because it’s simple, it’s free, it’s easy to use, easily accessible, all that kind of stuff.

But I stopped using it, because of a problem I ran into with it is that it actually uses a lot of processing power on my computer, which makes it run really laggy. So if I’m doing seemingly something basic, like trying to screen capture something that has a video– like on YouTube– running in it, then all of the sudden, the video becomes really choppy, and my computer just slows down. And I have a pretty decent computer. I edit on a MacBook Pro.

So eventually I upgraded to iShowU HD, which for me, has been phenomenal. I love how simple it is. I don’t have to click and drag to guess what dimensions of a video, or the screen share capture size I want to have. I can just set it automatically. Capture in 1080p, and then click and drag it around to capture 1080p– it’s just awesome.

And most importantly, it is geared to use very few system resources while recording. So I can do very labor intensive things on my computer, screen capture it all smoothly without a problem. I love the program. Been using it for a long time. So I highly recommend it. There’s a link in the description section below where you can go download it if you’d like.

But that is a Mac only program. I actually haven’t used Windows for about eight years now. So I’m very much not up to date with what’s happening on that platform. But I have heard some people suggest that CamStudio is a good, free, open source screen recording program for Windows. And also heard that Fraps works very well on Windows. But you’ll have the pay a little bit if you want to unlock the pro version, which will then remove little watermarks, and let you record longer videos, and fuller, bigger sized resolution videos.

I’ve also heard a lot of people recommend Camtasia, which is for Mac and Windows. But it’s pretty pricey. It’s currently $299 for Windows, or $99 for Mac. And also for Mac, I’ve heard a lot of people recommend ScreenFlow, which is also $99.

So you’ll have the check out each of these. Figure out which one might work best for you. And then check out the comments. And I hope that’s where most of you guys find the value of this video, is in the comments, in the recommendations that other people are leaving for different screen capture programs that they’ve used, both for Windows and for Mac. And also both free ones, and paid ones.

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FREE SCREEN CAPTURE PROGRAMS
Quicktime (Mac)
CamStudio (Windows)

PAID SCREEN CAPTURE PROGRAMS
iShowU HD
Fraps
Camtasia
Screenflow