MacMost Now 286: Snow Leopard and 64-Bit Mode

Learn more about Snow Leopard running 64-bit applications and whether you need to worry about if your Mac boots using the 64-bit kernel.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary, with MacMost Now. On today's episode, let's take a look at the new screen recording features of QuickTime 10. So in episode 287, the one major new feature of QuickTime 10 I didn't talk about was the ability for it to take video captures of your screen, in other words capture your screen and all the movement of the windows, the mouse, things that change. Let's go and take a look at how that works in QuickTime 10. So to start screen recording, you want to go to QuickTime player. Make sure you're running QuickTime 10, not QuickTime 7, which should also be there with Snow Leopard. And then you want to do file, new screen recording. It will come up with this little window here, and it's going to give you some options underneath this triangle. You can choose which microphone you're going to use to record. It's going to record the audio from that microphone, but it will not record the sounds that are coming from your Mac. Also, you can choose the quality, medium will compress the video more. You can choose where to save the file to. To start, press the red record button. It's going to tell you that to stop recording you've got to use this stop button up here, or you can press command-ctrl-escape. You hit start recording, and it clears that away. And now you can go ahead and do various things on your Mac, like say open a finder window, go to safari, navigate around to different pages. Do anything you want, move your cursor around. And when it's time to stop, press the stop recording button here.
We'll then go back to QuickTime 10, and it will open up the movie that you've seen. Let's shrink it a bit by hitting command minus, so we can get this into a smaller window. And we can scroll along here and see that it's actually recorded everything that we've done on the screen, like that. Now there's some restrictions to what you can and can't record. For instance, if you bring up DVD player and play a DVD, you'll notice that it's just a grey rectangle where you would normally be seeing the video; it doesn't let you record the DVD content. Now that we have this video here in QuickTime 10, we can go ahead and save it. So you can use all the different options, like "save as", and you can choose different options, what format to save it in. You get plenty more options here because this is high resolution video. You can actually save it all the way up to 1080p here, or you can go ahead and basically save it as an original movie, Which will save it in full resolution. You can also go ahead and share to iTunes, MobileMe, or YouTube. Go back to episode 287 to see some of the different saving options that you've got. For instance, if you go and you save it for a webpage, you're going to get 3 different versions of it.
And the appropriate one will play back on the appropriate device, like, say, a very small version for the iPhone, a much larger version for safari on your computer.
So previous to QuickTime 10, people like myself have been able to use screen captures in tutorials using 3rd party software. So for years, for instance, I've used SnapzPro, which allows you to capture just a portion of the screen, and has a lot more features than QuickTime 10 does. In addition to that, a more advanced program called Screen Flow allows you to capture video of yourself talking in, say, a corner, as well as the screen at the same time. Also a very popular piece of windows software, Camtasia, just came to the Mac, and that also has a ton more features than what QuickTime X has. There's also one called Jing Project, which is a free utility that allows you to do quick screen captures, with some really interesting features. So while the screen capture utility in QuickTime 10 is interesting, it's not really very useful compared to any of these 3rd party tools. It's maybe something you can do to just capture some behavior on your screen or make a quick video to show somebody how to do something, something like that. But if you want to get serious about screen captures and creating tutorials, you're probably going to want to try one of these pieces of 3rd party software. That's it for now, till next time, this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

Comments: 3 Responses to “MacMost Now 286: Snow Leopard and 64-Bit Mode”

Sundog

15 years ago

Thanks Gary!

Done, no more need to think about this. :)

Since I do Casting as well I appreciate the work that goes into your movies.

Yeah BUT about the FACT that a 64 bit kernel with 64-bit integer capability: All general-purpose registers (GPRs) are expanded from 32 bits to 64 bits, and all arithmetic and logical operations, memory-to-register and register-to-memory operations, etc. can now operate directly on 64-bit integers.

A 64bit kernel is faster then a 32 bit kernel and even if you don't have the memory it will perform faster anywhere from roughly 5%-10%

Gary Rosenzweig

Yes, but just the kernel. Just the kernel. The apps themselves that are 64-bit will use 64-bit operations regardless of the kernel. And the apps that are 32-bit will use 32-bit integer operations. Having a 64-bit kernel is NOT going to speed up your apps 5%-10%.

Comments Closed.

MacMost Now 286: Snow Leopard and 64-Bit Mode

Comments: 3 Responses to “MacMost Now 286: Snow Leopard and 64-Bit Mode”

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