Using ScreenFlow for creating coubs

ScreenFlow is a screen capture app, but it also have a simple but powerful video editing tool and it can cover most needs of advanced couber.

I’ll try to describe the process of making this coub in Screenflow.

I have captured and combined to the single video several different game over cinematics of the Mountain game.

First we need to capture the on-screen video. This process is pretty straightforward, you just start Screenflow and the first thing you see is the screen capture dialog. Just click the red button and it start screen capture. Everything you see on your desktop will be captured to the video file and then you can edit it in ScreenFlow montage tool. For example, it is perfect to capture a video games footage or for demonstrating desktop applications features.

I spent about an hour recording the game cinematics over and over again until I got 8 different variants.

Then we need to sync these different pieces of video. We can do it in ScreenFlow built it montage tool. You can place videos in different layers and move it forward and backward. I placed my 8 videos in different layers, synced it and cropped it to the equal pieces.

The cinematic takes more than 30 seconds, and we have a Coub’s 10 seconds limit, so we need to speed up the playback. We can do it in the Clip Inspector: right click on the video clip, choose Clip Inspector and move Speed control to the far left position. Now we have about 7 seconds for each cinematics, that’s close.

Next thing we need to do is to crop everything around the game window. We can do it in the Video Properties sidebar in Cropping fieldset. I have selected all video clips and set the same cropping values:

I also resized the canvas area to make it twice bigger on both sides than the game window.

Then I grouped 8 clips into four layers, 2 on each layer, and positioned them on the canvas. In each place two clips should cycle one after another in 5 seconds interval to match 10 seconds cycle. If you drag one clip to another, the overlapped area will become a transition. And you can also set the type of transition, I used Cross Disolve.

On each layer I made a cycling clips several times:

And the final step is to move clips on each layer to make them start in delay:

Next we need to export the video: File -> Export… and then select the “Web - High” preset.

To make the resulting video more suitable for Coub, it is better to tweak the default “Web - High” preset to set the framerate to 25. You can also set datarate value to something insanely high like 3000 kbits/sec to preserve video quality. Coub will reconvert it anyway.

Then I’ve uploaded the file to the Coub editor, added sountrack and that’s it:

I used just a basic ScreenFlow functions. And it also have a lot of more advanced features: text labels, sound editing, video filters such as color adjustment or mask and much more. ScreenFlow is quite expensive in the world of $1 apps, but it is worth of it’s money if you occasionally need a simple video editing tool.