I’ve been working on some big editing breakdown videos lately,
and getting all of the screen grabs of me editing is taking so much time,
which got me thinking that I could make a video about my two favorite screen recording tools:
Kap, which is available for Mac, and OBS, which is available for all operating systems.
In this video, I’ll be going through my process of getting these screen recordings,
what I think about, and how I use these particular applications.
First I’m going to talk about “Kap”, which is what I use most of the time because it is very simple
and it works great for my editing breakdowns. You can record the screen pretty much right away.
It has all the features like cropping, and setting the frame rate, and you can also hide the cursor
or highlight your clicks while you’re recording. It also has extra features and plugins,
like you can show which keys you’re typing, you can get it to turn off notifications,
record system audio, and more. And Kap doesn’t seem to affect
the speed of using my editing programs: there’s no lag or anything like that, even
while recording the full screen at 4K resolution. The file sizes are also really small, like for one
minute of recording, it’s under ten megabytes. Which is pretty impressive because I don’t
notice any sort of poor quality out of that. It looks exactly like I’m using the screen.
A couple of things I don’t like about Kap: You can only choose between 30 frames per second
and 60 frames per second, there’s also no live streaming feature, and being so simple it does
sacrifice being able to customize everything. But it serves the purposes that I need for
recording my screen to show y’all, so I use it for most of the screen
recordings that I do in my youtube videos. Okay, now I’m going to talk about “OBS
Studio,” which I would recommend if you do not have a Mac, or if you’re looking for a screen
recording app that is fully-equipped with every feature you can think of.
So when you open OBS, it kind of looks like an infinity mirror, which I think is pretty fun.
There are also a lot of buttons but it didn’t take me long to get the hang of OBS.
You can press “Start Recording” and get going real quick.
But if you go into the settings, you really see all that this app is capable of.
You can change the video bitrate, which is how much detail is stored in every pixel, the
higher quality also meaning a higher file size. It has a lot of audio features like recording
the system audio, recording multiple channels of audio, stuff like that.
You can choose almost any frame rate, I haven’t used it for streaming but I
know it’s pretty common for people on Twitch and Youtube to use it for their
livestreams and it seems to work really well. The only problem I’ve had with it is that if I
maximize the bitrate and resolution, and try to record at 30 frames per second,
sometimes it can’t handle me doing very intense editing using up a lot of memory,
so it will actually lag with the frame rate and capture 15 frames per second instead of thirty,
but I fixed it by turning down the resolution and bitrate to use less computer processing power.
I also sometimes record my phone screen, which is built-in through the notification
bar on some Android smartphones. There’s also an Android app called “AZ
Screen-recorder” that I’ve used and it’s pretty good, but I still stick to the built-in one.
iPhones also have
a built in screen recorder - “They do!” That’s a question for editing Henry and not
filming Henry - “it’s in the iOS settings.” Okay, some helpful tips for getting screen
recordings, the main thing I like to think about is aesthetics.
In my editing tutorials, I prefer to not show the entire screen, because I don’t think you
need to see every part of the screen in order for me to communicate what I’m trying to show.
So that’s something you want to think about: what do you want to show?
Do you want it to be– the audience sees exactly what you see, the entire screen?
Or do you want to have it more streamlined and focused on specific things?
I would definitely make decisions about how you do your screen recording based on
whether and how much you will edit it. Because screens come in many different
shapes and sizes, and if you’re putting that into a video with other footage,
you want it to flow together and not have anything feel out of place.
So if you’re just going to record constantly, like a stream, and you’re not going to edit it down,
you probably want to plan what you’re going to do ahead of time.
For me, I do a lot of editing on my screen grabs, so I just kind of wing it,
and then later I edit out the parts I don’t like. A lot of times, I’ll speed up a screen grab,
or cut away to me talking, and then cut back to a screen grab so I can hide the parts where I’m
doing something dumb or just too slowly. Another thing I worry about when
capturing screen grabs is motion blur. I’ll often add motion blur in editing
because I want it to have a smooth look. You can check out my video in the top right
to learn how to edit motion blur like that. Sometimes in my editing breakdowns I also just
use normal screenshots if I don’t need to show anything moving.
Like I’ll have the timeline and it’ll zoom into a clip or it’ll show a sound effect popping up,
or I’ll animate the timeline cursor: all of that is over a still image.
Alright so feel free to check out OBS and Kap in the description, they are both free.
Also since today is Friday, this is another part of my series “Freebie Friday,” which
is when I occasionally find or make free stuff for you that’s helpful and relevant to videos.
In the past, I’ve given away homemade sound effects,
a lighting infographic, effects I use, and more. So check out those past videos in the description.
Stay tuned for the editing breakdowns I’m working on, and thank you for watching.