Sam Oliver
People familiar with the latest betas of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard have been reporting over the past several weeks the addition of a 'Screen recording' option in the File menu of the new Quick Time X Player due to ship with the OS overhaul later this summer.
Similar in many ways to a feature long offered by Ambrosia Software through its Snapz Pro X utility, the option will allow users to capture in motion video their Mac's screen — essentially video screenshots.
Such a feature will be particularly useful for software developers and educators, as it will simplify the process of creating video tutorials, software demonstrations, and anything else best captured in live motion as opposed to still shots.
When selecting the screen recording option under recent pre-release distributions of Snow Leopard, a recording interface prompts the user to begin a video capture then disappears. A small footprint controller in the upper-right hand side of the Mac OS X menubar can be used to end the video capture.
While its unclear if the feature is fully functional in build 10A335 released Thursday, it wasn't in earlier builds, often creating an empty .mov file, those familiar with the software say.
An artist's mockup of the minimal QuickTime X Player window interface with the "trim" tools overlay.
QuickTime X — along with the minimal-interfaced QuickTime X Player (renditions) — leverages media technology pioneered by Apple for the iPhone OS. When it makes its debut on the Mac with Snow Leopard, it'll offer optimize support for modern audio and video formats resulting in extremely efficient media playback, the company has said.
Wesley Hilliard
AppleInsider Staff
Christine McKee
Andrew O'Hara
William Gallagher
47 Comments
Snapz Pro X always gets mentioned, but I find ScreenFlow to be an excellent and lightweight recording app that harnesses the power of CoreAnimation to record you screen, audio, webcam, and even your keyboard input with powerful and simple editing tools included. I hope Apple is taking notes from that amazing app for QuickTime X.
This will just lead to widespread copyright infringement.
Does it strike anyone else that QuickTime Player would be the application you use to record video?
Having said that I would really appreciate this functionality.
This will just lead to widespread copyright infringement.
no it wont. the ability to screen capture has been around for a while. this will hurt snapz pro sales, and thats about it.
This will just lead to widespread copyright infringement.
I'm not so sure about that. The removal of DRM off iTS music isn't creating any new copyright infringement as the audio could be had elsewhere and probably in better quality for free. I think the same goes for screen recording. There are already programs that do screen recording but popping in a DVD movie and recording your screen is by far one of the least efficent ways to copy video. Google already caches images and you can already drag-n-drop images or take a screen shoot of an image with OS X so I don't see what else there would be to infringe upon with built-in screen recording.