I’ve been working on another machinima project.
For over a year now, I’ve been doing these things on and off. I’ve learned a lot, mostly by being incredibly frustrated for extended periods of time.
Throughout all of this time, I have used Snapz Pro X to capture the movie clips from Second Life, or whatever other virtual world platform I was using. This product is indispensable, and yet it has provided me with some of my most miserable moments. You see, Snapz has a dangerous propensity to lose all the data that you just captured with it.
The main reason is that it is simultaneously inflexible and intolerant when it comes to disk space. Inflexible because it contains no options allowing the user to save output to any drive except the boot drive. Snapz creates a temporary capture file as it is going along, and then it encodes this into the final output format. This process requires up to twice as much disk space as either of these files require on their own. Intolerant, because if you run out of space on your primary disk, Snapz bins all your work. That’s it. Bye bye. See you later.
So I decided to try an alternative piece of capture software called iShowU.
In many ways, this software seemed to be the answer to my prayers. It offers useful and easily configurable profiles for capture. The save file is produced immediately after capture finishes – no hanging around. Finally, it only uses one lot of disk space. If there’s 1Gb left on the disk you can stop capture, and know that saving your work will require no further space. Oh, and joy of joys – you can configure where the final output is sent, and where the temporary files are kept.
After joyously using this for a brief period, I noticed that Second Life was running unusually slowly while I was capturing it. An investigation revealed, perhaps obviously, that some of the benefit of iShowU was coming at a cost. So I did a quick and dirty test.
A quick look at Activity Monitor while capturing reveals that Snapz uses about 2.5% of a CPU on my MacBook Pro to capture at 1280×720 (it’s a 2.33GHz Core 2 Duo).
The same test for iShowU reveals that it is using more than an entire CPU for its capture at the same resolution and target frame rate.
When it is capturing, Snapz Pro is obviously writing its output into a file with very little compression. All the CPU requirement comes afterwards for the encoding. iShowU achieves its greater convenience by doing the processing at capture time, but of course that has a major impact on the application being captured. This is probably tolerable for capturing Safari or Mail or other less demanding applications, but not for Second Life, or games.
So I guess I’m going to end up putting up with Snapz and its idiosyncrasies for a while yet. I’m just going to cross my fingers for the provision of additional preferences so that I can tell it where to put its files.
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
which codec are you using for output? i use ALC for speed…
It depends what it is for.
If I’m not going to edit it, at least beyond just chopping bits off with QT Pro, then H.264.
For editing with iMovie or Final Cut Express HD 3.5, I have been outputting Apple Intermediate Codec (using the 720p preset). Both of those editors transcode HD formats into that for editing anyway.
Now I have Final Cut Studio 2, I have switched to outputting Apple Prores 422 for editing.
I have another post up my sleeve about machinima workflow because it’s just generally weird and I’ve wasted so much time trying to do it in wrong ways…
Fascinating.
I’ve used iShowU until now (for the minimal screencapturing I’ve needed to do) but when I got SnapzProX from MacHeist I did notice the statement that it is supposed to use very little CPU compared to other solutions. I don’t like the UI particularly, though.
Pretty interesting stuff.
On a different note, have you found any way to “zoom in” to a particular area of the screen when capturing using either of these tools? I’ve seen it done in screencasts, I just can’t figure out how, unless they do it post-capture.
Andy, I’ve been wondering about this now that you’ve mentioned it.
There are quite a few little Mac tools to help screencasters – I remember seeing something, for example, which could highlight things around the mouse pointer, to illustrate which bit of the screen you were talking about. I’ve not found anything to help with zooming, though.
In answer to this, therefore, I can only think that those screencasts are capturing at a higher resolution to preserve quality, and then doing the zooming in post production as you suggest.
thanks for posting this – I have gone through exactly the same frustrations, trying both ishowu and snapz with my mac, trying to edit in final cut studio. absolutely frustrating as heck.. thank you for getting to the bottom of some of the questions that have been plaguing me these past weeks. I look forward to your next post about workflow.. as there are still many issues remaining:)
lizsolo
the experiments i have been conducting have created some bizarre routes trying to get high quality screen capture in to FCP
thanks again
Glad to see that the iPhone drove you to start blogging again! Jen
Can anyone tell me what is needed to create Machinima on the Mac ? Apple store had a capturing device but was 300 usd. I think there might be an alternative. Any tips are appreciated ,thanks. dmask
Hi David,
I don’t know anyone who creates machinima using capture hardware. Most people seem to run a screen capture application, such as iShowU or Screenflow, and use that to capture the window with Second Life, or whatever, running in it.
What sort of thing are you trying to do?
Hi Ian, thanks for the great post.. wish I had come across it last year. I too use SnapzProX and sometimes iShowU. Today I captured a very long video at 1280×720 and encountered that dreaded out of disk space error. I actually had 58 GB on the disk.. so mad at myself!!! I had been recording an event in Second Life (SL Story Project on Karuna Island) and now have not a thing to show. I will indeed go back to iShowU which I use sporadically when filming something lengthy such as this event. Ugh! I should have stopped this half way and then opened iShowU to finish it. Though the last couple of times I did that, no audio (mac and microphone) was recorded using iShowU.
While saving the SnapzproX file and still using SL voice in Second Life and continuing the recording of video and audio (mac and microphone) using iShowU.. no audio. So, that’s why I didn’t cut the recording off earlier. I’m rambling here.. but I am soooo mad at myself.
hi hvxsilverstar, thanks for the comment. I don’t think that you should be mad at yourself, rather at the producers of all this hard to use and flaky software. I don’t think that Windows machinima makers have these problems, and it’s embarrassing.
I haven’t done any machinima projects recently, but will probably try out Screenflow for the next one. Everyone raves about it, but I suspect that it may be more suitable for general screencasting than machinima, so I have reservations.
However, I think that iShowU isn’t as bad as I had thought – if you pick the codec well, you can probably make it run in a much less CPU intensive way than is depicted above.
One final wondering… are you using the latest version of Snapz? I had read somewhere that it was a bit better now at dealing with errors.
Hi there, thanks for your response. Yes, I am using Snapz Pro X 2.1.3fc2.
Yes, I have heard great things about Screenflow and I too will be moving to it shortly. I do like iShowU (and Torley loves it) and have only had issues with it not recording audio when using it directly following Snapz when recording sl voice.. have to test that out again as I still don’t understand what’s going on there. My PC has vista on it (massive mistake) and had problems recording sl video on it but I see there is also a new version of FRAPS that works with vista so will upgrade. I had been using Camtasia 6 (HD) on it which did a good job of the video but CPU intensive.
Back to my Snapz problem…. I did try seeking out the temp file to no avail: http://www.ambrosiasw.com/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t103563.html
Such a shame as I love Snapz.. otherwise.
thanks, hvx