In today’s live stream and video we are covering the best software for recording your screen. This is specifically for Mac. We’re going to look at some of my favourite software options and I’m also going to not only talk about them but I believe in also showing you guys. So it’s going to be a bit of a show and tell.
🕒Timestamps🕒
Loom: 3:23
Snagit: 10:05
Screenflow: 14:10
Mac inbuilt (Shift + Command + 5) : 17:52
Quicktime: 20:18
1️⃣Loom: https://www.loom.com/
2️⃣Snagit: https://www.techsmith.com/screen-capture.html
3️⃣Screenflow: http://www.telestream.net/screenflow/overview.htm
4️⃣Mac inbuilt (Shift + Command + 5)
5️⃣Quicktime: https://support.apple.com/downloads/quicktime
🔴Get your free Facebook Live Cheat Sheets🔴: https://saranguyenonline.com/special/facebook-live-cheat_sheets/
Best Screen Recording Software (for MAC) – Video Transcription
We’re going to talk you through my favourite ones and then also do a little bit, a little bit of a demo so you can actually see what it’s like so you can decide whether or not it’s right for you. I’ve got a couple of budget options, different price points so you can choose for yourself.
For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Sara Nguyen, and I help awesome entrepreneurs like yourself, build and grow their businesses and income using video on social media. Now, make sure you check out the links in the description ’cause I’ll also at the end of this broadcast, put links to everything that I mentioned in this video.
Let’s get right into it. What are the best, what’s all the, there’s a lot of software out there, and this is a strange time, so one of the things that I know for myself is that I use a lot of software to record my screen and you may as well, you may be looking to, whether that is recording tutorials, recording my screen to-do lessons for my courses or recording my screen to-do instructions or just to communicate with people remotely.
It’s something that I’ve used a lot, but I know that I’ve used even more now that a lot of people are remote. I’m going to go through some really good players in the game right now. Let’s get right into it.
The first software for recording your screen and this one does work for PC and Mac and it also is one that you can use both web based using the browser, the browser option or using the app and they are loom. I really like loom. They have a free version plus a paid version and the paid version is actually really affordable. I actually have the paid version because I believe in supporting developers and supporting, you know, businesses so they can grow. With the free version you get pretty much as much as you get in the paid version, the paid version, you do get a little bit more features, but you can get away with just the free version.
If you are a teacher, if you’re in education you actually get it for free as well. That’s why this one really touched me a little bit because I was like, yes they are a great software and they’re supporting the teachers and education because it’s a really strange and challenging time right now for teachers. Anyone who supports teachers, they get a thumbs up in my book.
As I said, you can use it either from the app so you can install it on your computer or you can use the browser version and it’s incredibly easy to use. I’m going to show you exactly how to use it. Let me go over and share my screen. I’m also going to hide myself. Please let me help myself. Flawless. We are absolutely flawless. I’m going to move myself because it won’t let me hide myself for the time being. Very strange. Let’s look at loom now.
I’ve installed loom and it looks a little something like what you see here. When you select the little icon, you can see that you have an option to choose which camera you want. This is a little bit confusing. You can see this circle version. This is from loom, this central one here is me.
It’s just a little bit confusing. I don’t know why the software is doing that, but I’m just rolling with it. But you get to choose the size of your circles so you can be bigger or smaller in the corner. You can also in the top right-hand corner here, you can see that you can choose which camera you want to use.
At the moment it’s using the same camera that I’m live streaming through. but you can, if you have a webcam or if you have your laptop cam, you can choose whichever cam you want.
You can also choose whichever microphone input you want. This is also picking up my USB microphone, but there’s other microphones that you have. You can choose whichever one you want there. You can choose to record your entire screen or you can choose to just record the screen only and or with the camera only if you want it to.
This is about recording the screen. That’s what we’re going to do. Okay. I really love, Oh, there you go. It’s disappeared again. I really love loom for a couple of reasons. I’m going to do a bit of a demo. The app version is misbehaving a little bit of course while I’m live, but that’s okay. It’s making my screen disappear, but I actually found it really useful. There you go. Now it’s working.
You see you’ve got the option of using it from the app in the top corner or you can install it on your Chrome browser. And when you do that, you have the same options that you have with the app version. And I’m in the corner here in very blown out yellow, because that’s choosing that camera. Let’s fix that. You can choose the size of your actual circles. You can choose to be really big or you can choose to be a mama bear or you can choose to be baby bear size. In terms of recording your actual screen, you have the option of either the entire desktop or just part of the screen. Full desktop and then, this is not exactly how, it’s a bit buggy right now. It’s very odd.
Anyway, you can record the full desktop and then you can choose which monitor, if you have different monitors you want to record from. And then you select start recording and there you go. It’s letting me choose now. then you get a countdown.
I’m in the corner and it’s recording. I can see loom is sharing your screen and I can talk and I can go through things and I can still be in the corner if I wanted to stay there and I can record and record and record. Then once I’m done, I select that green button there. Here is where I can do quite a few things. The first thing I can do is this is a page that I can send people.
You can download the video, there’s this button here and you can then edit that in an external video editor or you can just send this link to someone if you wanted them to view it from this page. That way they don’t need to install any software. They can just click on the link and watch the video. This is really great.
Particularly if you work with virtual assistants or you work with virtual team members, you can communicate using, the, well this functionality. It’s really cool. In terms of editing, I thought that the editing capability was a little bit limited, but it wasn’t bad. You could use this to record and then use another tool to edit.
Otherwise I’ve got some basic editing functionality. If you select trim, then it lets you select sections to cut out the video, like this, then you go remove. You can only remove one section at a time and then you go publish changes and then it makes those changes.
If you wanted to remove another section, you would go back in and trim it again. That’s how you would actually edit it. I really liked it because it’s really easy to use once, the software doesn’t bug out on you when you’re on a live stream. You get to choose adding yourself in there. You can do just a screen and close any, the icon of you here or you can, you know, switch between different monitors as well.
I really like the simplicity of it. That’s really great. That’s the first option that I have. loom, they are really easy to use,
Let me switch back to here, a really easy to use screen recorder software and I highly, highly recommend them. They’re really amazing. The second one that I use all the time and really love is SnagIt. SnagIt is one that is a paid one. I find them really good to use because you can do both recording your screen and take screenshots and annotate your screenshots really easily.
I think they are actually a lot stronger as a screenshot software so you can take screenshots and then edit them, crop them, add annotations, add texts really, really easily. But they also do video recording as well if you needed that functionality and it’s just another option for you to consider.
Let’s have a look now at SnagIt. Alright, so I’ve installed SnagIt, so it is a software based, I’ll share my screen again, it is a, I’m gonna move you ’cause you’re distracting me, it is a software so it’s not web based and you install the app and now it is not allowing me to– what’s going on today? I’m just going to take a second to try to sort out this software. Software is misbehaving today and I don’t know why. Okay. Let me try this again. Trying to share my screen and it’s not showing the actual top of the screen.
Hopefully this is working a little bit better now. What a day, what a livestream. Now you can see it. This is SnagIt in the top right-hand corner here. What happens with SnagIt is that when I select the video option here, I can choose to record the entire screen or a region.
If I want to just record a section, then I can just select that part. And then I can also choose to record audio over that as well as I can choose a microphone if I wanted to, if there’s system audio. If you’re playing a video that you want included, that will also be an option that you can include as well. You can choose to include the webcam or not and when you select capture, so this is if I choose a region, so let’s just say I only want to show this part, and then I simply have the monitor here so I can see the audio come through. I can see the size of it and then I hit record.
That’s how easy it is to use. Now there’s a countdown and then I can talk and walk people through whatever is in that section there. That’s how you use SnagIt. I really like SnagIt.
Now that the video is complete, I’ve got it here and I can either export it, so I go to file and then save as and I can save it as a video or I can save it as a gif image. Or I can connect my account and share it so you can upload it directly to Google drive or to, you know, the other Dropboxes and whole range of other sharing destinations. SnagIt is the second option that I have for recording your screen. It’s a really good option as well.
The third option is my personal favourite and this is ScreenFlow and I really love ScreenFlow because they give you the best of everything.
They give you the option to record your screen. You can also record your device. I use it to record my iPhone. If I’m showing people things through apps, how to use apps or just a particular software on my iPhone or my iPad as well. And I really, really love it.
It’s a really versatile piece of software because you can record and then you can edit it and you get the layers so that you can add overlays on it. You can crop things out. It’s a really beautiful piece of software and I’ve been using it for a very long time and I, it’s my go-to one that I cannot live without. I think if you want the ability to edit the screen recordings that you have, ScreenFlow is by far the most powerful and the easiest to use that I’ve seen on the market.
Let’s have a look at what ScreenFlow looks like. Okay, so I’m going to minimise a couple of things. Oh, dang! What’s happening today? Let’s delete you. Now, as you can see, all of my apps are open here. I swear I’m more organised than this.
This is ScreenFlow here and with ScreenFlow, you can choose to record your, you know, different desktops. You can also choose to record video from a camera into ScreenFlow as well. You can also choose different microphone inputs as well. If you’re recording your desktop, you, in this case, I can choose, either monitor and I’m going to choose my iMac and then I’m going to select record.
I also can choose just a region, but I’m going to record my entire computer so you can see. And it’s just setting up now. And there’s a countdown. I can see it’s recording the desktop and audio and then I record. Alright, so I’m just recording now and let’s go.
Now once I’m done with the recording, I hit stop. This is the editor, so I, I’ve got the soundtrack here. I can scrub through the sound and cut out sound. I can look at the screen recording here and then I can also add text really easily as well, so I can, you know, annotate or add text here. It’s really a, one of the best pieces of software for recording your screen that I’ve ever used and I really, really love it.
I think the downside is that it’s Mac only, but if you’re on this watching this video, you probably are a Mac user, so that’s not really your problem. I think in terms of price it’s not too bad. I can’t remember the price off the top of my head, but they do have yearly upgrades and I think it’s quite affordable in the grand scheme of things for something that you use all the time. Really, really love ScreenFlow and highly, highly recommend it.
Now I’ve talked about three options. I’ve talked about loom, I’ve talked about SnagIt and ScreenFlow and they’re all paid options, but what about some free options? I’m glad that you asked because there are a few free options that I’d like to go through as well.
The first one is a Mac one specific and you probably already have this feature, but you may just not be aware of it and it is in-built into Mac. If you have the operating systems, either Mojave or Catalina, you already have it and you may just not be aware of it. And all you have to do to record your screen is select the shift command and the number five. This will open up the options for you to actually record your screen.
Let’s have a look at how you actually do that. This is my screen, I can see that you can see it. I’m going to select shift command five and I’m going to move myself and get out of there. I’m going to move myself ’cause it hid there. Shift command five and in the bottom you can see there’s options here to capture the entire screen.
There’s options here to capture selected window, capture selected portion, all the entire screen or select a portion. I can also choose to add a microphone there as well. I can also choose to save it to my desktop or wherever I want to save it. And I’m going to put a five second timer and then select record.
It’s really tiny, but the time is happening and it’s recording my desktop. I can see there’s a faint like darkness around the edges and now it’s just recording. Once I’m done, I hit the button and if I go to my desktop, this is the file. Just going to close this so I can show a better example and that’s it. This is a recording from the free Mac application.
That neat little trick, you may already have it. Try it out for yourself. Shift command five to record your desktop from a Mac. Pretty cool, huh?
The last one is another free one, which you may or may not know exists and it is QuickTime. A lot of people aren’t aware that QuickTime allows you to actually record your desktop as well. I’m going to bring up the software. Okay. The computer is doing all sorts of weird things. Of course it’s doing weird things while I’m on a live stream, but that’s okay. We roll with the punches. I’m going to share my screen again.
Now I’ve opened up QuickTime, and to record your screen, you simply go to file, new screen recording. Then similar to the other option there, you’ve got options to choose which portion of your screen you want to record and then when you hit record, there’s that tiny little countdown that’s happening in the bottom.
Okay. Allow it to access everything, then in theory it’s recording my screens. I’m gonna wave my mouse around and move stuff around. Once I’m done, I hit that button there. And this is the recording. This is the recording. There you go. And it’s really cool.
In terms of editing it, you can’t actually edit it in QuickTime player, but you can export it to, well send it to a video editor. You can use iMovie to cut it up. You can use ScreenFlow to cut it up. There’s lots of options for you there.
Yeah, that essentially wraps up the five different options and the tutorial walkthrough of the best software for recording your screen. I talked about loom as an option, really amazing one for both PC and Mac where you can use the app or you can use the Chrome extension if it doesn’t freak out on you when you’re in a livestream.
You can also use SnagIt, a great one as well. It’s really good to do short snippets of video. My personal favourite ScreenFlow such a versatile piece of software. Allows you to record your screen, multiple devices and edit it all in one tool. It’s definitely my favourite.
There’s the free Mac in-built option where you just have to hit shift command and five and then you can start recording. And then there’s also QuickTime. QuickTime allows you to record your screen just using that software there and you already have it. If you have a Mac, it’s, and if you don’t you can download it, but it comes with typically comes with your Mac as well.
Hopefully you found this video, this video useful, and the walkthrough is useful as well. If you like this video, give me a thumbs up and don’t forget to subscribe to my channel. And if you’re looking for more ways to grow your business using video, make sure you check out my Facebook Live Cheat Sheets. It’s a super simple way of getting you up and streaming on Facebook live, even if you’ve never hit record before.
I’m going to put a link to the cheat sheets in the description and somewhere on the screen, hopefully and I appreciate you being here and appreciate just the opportunity to go live and connect with you.