Notes for Screenography

Screenography seemed very finicky. Many tests failed to display the flash file. Turns out this happened when I selected the Flash 7 lossless codec. No audio, but otherwise, this app has nearly the same options and interface as SnapzPro. Takes a long time to export to Flash. No controller for finished .swf movies.

Quality can be excellent, but file sizes very large. A 20-second movie ended up over 21mb (489px wide... same size). Frame rate at 30fps. Turning down to 18fps reduced file size to 16mb. 12fps and 18% size reduction=10mb; reducing that to 8fps=8mb

Couldn't convert Flash or reduce it with VisualHub.

One unique, nice feature is the ability to apply the usual SnapzPro-style drop shadows, fades, and crops to the movie... adds a very nice effect.

Screenography can export to several different movie types, including QuickTime and Flash. To QT, it uses the standard QuickTime Pro export options, so you can optimize and resize during the file save. However, the export process--even with identical specs to QT Pro and DisplayEater--takes much longer and consumes more CPU power. This was the only package that made me glance at Activity Monitor during export.... it was using 225% of the CPU at one point and more typically was consuming 95-100%.

After numerous attempts with different settings, I gave up trying to save the movie as a QuickTime file. Not sure what the trick is, but I've wasted too much time on this.

Later on... Was able to make QuickTime movies by selecting defaults rather than fiddling with them.

Tried one last time (I think it would be the last... I wrote to the developer, who asked a bunch of questions but hasn't yet provided any answers). This time, I set a specific color depth--millions--and again accepted the default QuickTime output settings. Yes, this seems to have been the problem. The software should default to something if a color depth is required.

The conversion to QT uses the same QTPro export as other packages, but doesn't provide a preview of any kind.