Mac OS X is full of ways to record your screen, with a tool built-in to Quicktime Player and a vast number of third-party apps. Among the many tools, Screenflow is easily our top choice. It's fast, feature-rich, handles everything about the screencasting process from start to finish, and doubles as possibly the best simple video editing application on the Mac.

Platform: Mac OS X
Price: $100

Features

• Record from your computer screen, a video camera, microphone and computer's audio all at the same time
• Excellent built-in editor that can also double as a phenomenal video editor.
• The editor allows you to add callouts, shapes, text overlays, and perform simple motion effects very easily.
• Publish directly to YouTube or Vimeo, or export to an all-in-one Flash video presentation
• Mac OS X Lion users can take advantage of several features like resume, auto saving, document versioning, and full screen mode.
• Export screencasts to multiple settings and save your own presets.
• Several built-in audio functions, such as a limiter and easy conversion to mono.

Where It Excels

ScreenFlow is a phenomenal application. It handles the screencasting workflow from start to finish. You can record your screen, yourself, your audio, and your computer's audio all at the same time. Then you can edit what you just recorded in ScreenFlow's built-in editor. From there you can add text overlays, video annotations, motion effects, focus a spotlight on the mouse's position, and a lot more. When you're finished with your recording, you can send it directly to YouTube or Vimeo, export to an embeddable Flash player for your web site, or export the video file to a number of other formats. It just takes care of absolutely everything you could need to do with a screencast.

But beyond screencasting, it's actually a very functional video editor. In the latest version of ScreenFlow, you can actually create a blank document and just throw a bunch of video files into it for editing purposes. Now that iMovie has its strange interface and isn't terribly easy to use, ScreenFlow is a great alternative for simple editing projects. It has a few built-in motion controls, plenty of transitions, and you can just drag the video you want to edit right onto the timeline. If Quicktime can open the video file, ScreenFlow can edit it. And ScreenFlow won't need to convert it to another format. It'll just play the video as-is. Sometimes it can get a little choppy if the video requires a bit of work to decode, but I use it to edit 1080p H.264 video on a MacBook Air and it handles things just fine.

What makes ScreenFlow so amazing is that it does everything and yet somehow doesn't feel like any of its abilities are superfluous. It's really an incredible app that's worth every cent if you do a lot of screencasting—and especially if you want a great little video editor as an added bonus.

Source: lifehacker.com