Notes for SnapzPro X

SnapzProX is easy to use with an interface very familiar to the many Mac users who use it for screenshots. It's convenient to be able to make movies with a tool I'm already familiar with.

However, trying these others makes me aware of a couple of SnapzPro annoyances. First, when you launch SnapzPro, you can no longer launch any other app until you finish or close it. Screenography--and all the others here--let you run other apps and then come back to the state you left them. Second, it's useless to be able to reduce the movie by set percentages if I always want to be able to make movies of a given pixel width. That's because, to modify the movie to that pixel width, I have to open it in QuickTime Pro anyway to resize it. Better to just shoot 100% to begin with.

Also, SnapzPro takes a very long time to save the results of its video capture, unlike some others... especially iShowU, which opens the movie instantly in QT Pro.

Specific test notes:

• First 2 tests of the same subject as the rest yielded 24kb files that had only one frame basically. I had set 15fps and set reduction of 50% for file dimensions. I used h264 compression and the default keyframes setting. Weird. Maybe it's the h264 compression, which I hadn't tried before?
• The next test kept causing Finder to crash every time I accessed the new file. It appeared to be a full video (when I could view the info it was about 30mb).**Yes, this is listed as a bug in the SnapzPro FAQ on Ambrosia's website; the blame a bug in QuickTime, but they could certainly make it so users didn't choose an option that doesn't work, I believe.
• The trick for h264 is to NOT specify a keyframe setting. Once I did this, the 54 second clip saved and opened in QuickTime, at 16.2mb. Edited it to 33 seconds.
• At 50%, the file was 369pixels wide, so still used QuickTime Pro to optimize and reduce dimensions to 320. The optimized file is 672kb, much larger than the other tools.