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Recording your screen in Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Recording your screen in Mac OS X Snow Leopard

QuickTime Player in Snow Leopard provides most of the features that were included in QuickTime Pro previously. One of these features is a built in screen recording component. Follow these steps to record your screen.

Open QuickTime Player. If it’s not on the Dock, open the hard drive and find it in the Applications folder.

Choose File > New Screen Recording.

If you want to record yourself speaking as you use the computer, click the arrow button and then select an audio input source from the pop-up menu. In this example Built-in Input Internal microphone was selected with high quality sound and the Movies folder as the save location were chosen.

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If you are going to record a presentation, open the file and prepare to start it. Next, click the Record button in the Screen Recording Window. Make note of the fact that when you are finished recording you can use the key combination Command-Control-Esc to stop recording. This is often easier than finding the Stop button in the menu bar.

As soon as the recording begins, start your presentation.

Step through each slide speaking as you go. When finished, stop the recording. (Click Stop in the menu bar, or press Command-CONTROL-Escape) (Not Command-Option-Escape)

The movie is automatically saved in the Movies folder, inside your home folder, and is opened for you to review. You will have some excess footage at the beginning and the end that can easily be cut out. It will be easier to edit the video if you resize it. Drag the diagonal lines in the lower right corner to make it smaller. (Or from the View menu select Decrease Size)

With QuickTime Player the active application, go to Edit / Trim…

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Drag the yellow Trim end points to the desired location. Click the Trim button. Save your movie.

The Last step is to format the file so it can be used on an iPod or published to the web as a podcast. From the File menu in QuickTime Player, select Save As. In the Format area, select iPod and click Save.

The file will be saved to your Movie folder in the new format. Drag that file into iTunes and transfer it to an iPod or publish it to the web

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