Many of you have been following my webinar series this week on the online audience engagement journey and how social and digital media play different roles at different times in education marketing (incidentally, the final part will be posted today). Producing this series this week gave me the opportunity to play with a new tool that I’ve been meaning to try for quite some time: ScreenFlow.

ScreenFlow is software that enables you to record your screen, audio and video. Now, in the past I have profiled Screenr as one of my Friday favorites. So, what’s difference with ScreenFlow and why am I now profiling a tool that you have to pay for (it costs US$99 at the time of writing) when I’ve already included one that is free to use?

To begin with, screenr only allows you to record up to 5 minute videos. Those videos are then also branded with the screenr logo, and you can only record audio from your microphone. On ScreenFlow, length is seemingly unlimited, there are considerably more editing features (though they are a bit limited if you’re used to video editing programmes), and you can record audio into your computer, audio from your computer itself (i.e. if you are playing a video on your screen as you are recording) and video, using your webcam. This makes it the perfect tool for recording non-live webinars.

Within a day of posting the first webinar I’d had an email from a presentations expert/trainer saying he was impressed with them and interested in how I produced them. It turns out to be a very simple answer: a combination of Prezi (another former Friday Favorite) and ScreenFlow together. And in truth, these were very much ‘knocked together’ this week and I could do a lot better. I keep pondering what I could do with a professional voice artist being used, for example, and perhaps some music. I could easily knock up a highly engaging promotional showreel for an organisation using this combination of tools (and happy to do some for people if they’re interested in commissioning them).

I suspect I shall be recording a lot more of my conference presentations from now on using this. Now I just need to find a clip-microphone (radio one) that I can also plug into my laptop. I wonder if they exist…