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Section :: software

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BB Flashback 3 Professional

Screencast recording tool review
Monday 26 September 2011.
 

£124 (£149 inc VAT – but check the site for international prices and taxes)
Blueberry Software: http://www.bbsoftware.co.uk

If you need to create demos or video tutorials showing some software in use, you need some screen recording and editing software. The UK-based company, Blueberry Software, has just released a new version of its screen recording suite, BB Flashback. Here I put it through its paces.

BB Flashback 3 lets you edit and annotate your recordings with keystrokes, text ’callouts’ and interactive buttons

Over the years, I’ve used many different screen recording tools including BB Flashback 2 AND TechSmith’s Camtasia Studio 7. Of these, my favourite is Camtasia for the simple reason that it offers a very broad range of recording and editing features and is easy to use. BB Flashback is easy to use too but, in its early releases, it trailed far behind Camtasia in terms of its range of features. Over the last few years, Flashback been steadily catching up with Camtasia. While it still doesn’t have an equivalent feature set, for all but the most demanding users it may have all you need. Since it is sold at a significantly lower price than Camtasia (which costs £230.50 inc VAT), it offers pretty good value.

When you start the recorder you can choose whether to record a specific window, a rectangular region or the full screen. You can record with or without sound and a webcam. If you choose to record sounds, you can either record the ‘speaker’ sounds – for example, to capture sounds from games or videos that on screen – or you can record from a microphone to add a narration.

The recorder deals well even with potentially tricky sources such as YouTube videos complete with soundtrack. You can either leave the recording control panel visible on screen or you may minimize it when the recording begins. One small annoyance is that, if you leave the panel visible when you start a recording, the control panel is liable to pop up over a selected recording area so that the panel itself is included in the recording. In Camtasia, the recorder’s control panel automatically positions itself outside the recording area.

You can record either a rectangular screen area, a specific window or one or more full screens. This is a nice feature if you have a multiple monitors and you want to switch between them or make a recording from an area that covers several monitors at once. Once you’ve recorded the screen you can either export the recording immediately or load it into the BB Flashback Player.

The Flashback Player lets you edit your movies by splicing together clips, adding annotations or inserting media such as static pictures and audio. These are arranged in their own timeline tracks so that they can be moved around to new locations relative to the main movie track. You can also add mouse effects such as highlighted circles over the mouse pointer. You may instruct the software to add annotations to display ‘invisible keystrokes’ – that is, labelled boxes that show when function keys, arrow keys, the escape key and so on were pressed. This would be particularly useful to someone creating software tutorials.

Invisible keystrokes are placed into the ‘objects’ row of the timeline. Other items may also be placed into this area. For example, you could insert a button into your movie. A button can be set to trigger an action when clicked – for example, to pause and restart your movie or go to a web address.

In general, I find the editing interface of BB Flashback less convenient than the Camtasia equivalent. In Camtasia, there is an area containing tabbed panels to give access to functions to control voice narrations, mouse effects, transitions and so on, and all the media – the video and audio clips and images – are grouped in a page so that they can be selectively dragged and dropped into the timeline when required. Flashback has no equivalent of this.

One thing which, in my view, is superior to Camtasia is Flashback’s interactive zoom. This lets you zoom and pan by moving a selection box over the main editing area of your movie. In Camtasia you have to move the zoom selector over a reduced preview of the movie which can be a bit hit-and-miss.

The thing I really miss, however, is the ability to apply transitions. Camtasia has a library of screen fades, glows, wipes and pixilations that can be applied between two clips to avoid an abrupt ‘join’. The best Flashback can do is to fade to a solid colour. I am assured that transitions are in development but won’t be available before version 4.0 of the software.

Overall, BB Flashback 3 provides a good range of recording and editing features. It still trails behind Camtasia but its lower price reflects that fact. There is also a cheaper edition (BB Flashback Standard, at £55) and a free edition (BB Flashback Express). Check the feature list for a comparison of the three editions: http://www.bbsoftware.co.uk/bbflashback/compareeditions.aspx

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