I just tried to create a screencast of one of the iPhone apps we developed. This was harder than creating the app itself and the result is pretty poor.

I don’t know if it is me, or if I just didn’t happen to find to right tools, but everything I tried is either crap, works to some extend but doesn’t to all I need and has some bugs, or is overly complex.

I tried:

• Snap X Pro
• Quicktime X Screenrecording
• ScreenFlow
• Camtasia
• Adobe After Effects CS4
• Adobe Premier Pro CS4
• Quicktime 7
• VLC
• Flash and F4V
• iMovie

The biggest problem I had is, that I didn’t manage to get a decent quality out of the screencast tools. Everything exported from Quicktime X, ScreenFlow, Snap X Pro or Camtasia seemed to have washed out colors.

I really tried all different kinds of settings, filters, codecs but for some reason the colors always looked crappy.
Then I opened the files in VLC the colors are fine, but not in Quicktime or exported as a Flash Movie.

I even tried to convert the files in VLC to another format (and hoping that this would solve the problem), but that didn’t lead to anything.

After Effects and Premier Pro had terrible complex interface and I didn’t manage to get anything useful out of them. I have to add that I only tried for about 15 minutes, but I shouldn’t have to read a book to get something like a screencast done.

Then I tried Adobe Flash and created a F4V movie. The colors where still washed out, but I already have given up on them anyway.
So I thought I’ll add a nice FLV web player to our homepage, only to find out that there is no out of the box, simple player that just works. All I wanted was a player with a play and pause button, maybe a video timeline that hides after the movie started and a volume control.

Why does everything has be so complicated?

Regarding the actual screen capture tools, in the end I used Camtasia to create the screencast, but it also has the color problem and it lacks some important features and seems to have some pixel edge problems. I ended up adding 5 layers of white images to hide some gray or yellow pixel lines on the edge of the actual movie. The zoom effect I added didn’t seem like a good idea anymore, as I had to add a white layer for every frame of the zoom animation.

You probably wanna see the end result, well it is a youtube video now – with crappy quality.

If anyone has a better toolchain or some advice on how to improve the quality, please leave a comment. I’d really appreciate it.

Anyhow, here is the video: