14 DAY TRIAL // TUAW touts Vara Software's screencasting application for Mac, ScreenFlow, as "possibly the only application in it's category to rightfully bill itself as a complete 'studio.'" This is one of the reasons why the publication was very excited to score an interview with Paul Carnine, Vara founder and developer.
ScreenFlow is a new application for creating screen recordings. It uses a unique new screen capture system, powerful enough to capture the contents of an entire desktop, a camera, microphone and a computer's audio, making it easy to create screencasts. The movie is then created in QuickTime format and is ready for use.
Vara Software won two Apple Design Awards, including Best Mac OS X Leopard Application. Since ScreenFlow is on everybody's lips right now, TUAW called Paul Carnine to talk about their achievement.
"It's an honor, more than anything else, when Apple chooses to single out an application like this ... it's pretty amazing, especially to win two," says Paul. "We worked really hard on the user interface, we worked really hard on the adoption of technologies ... we don't jump up and down and flaunt the technology."
Since Apple is all about innovation, Vara's founder claims the technology behind ScreenFlow "is driving the innovation," adding that he thinks "that's something that Apple appreciates." Well, they should since they picked it out.
"When you hold an iPhone, you don't see all the technology that's jam-packed in there, it just feels right and looks beautiful, and that's what we were trying to do. We said, 'Okay, we have this vision of how we want it to work, let's build the technology and basically hide it,'" Carnine went on to try and explain how they hoped to win Apple's heart over their screencasting app for Mac.
Asked whether they expected to win, Vara's developer revealed that it was a pretty wild ride, having witnessed the showcasing of powerful apps saying "Oh that's a pretty app," and "Oh that's nice" during their time at Apple's WWDC this year. "You forget what yours is like because your head's so into it all the time," the man claims.
Talking about ScreenFlow and what makes it so special, Carnine revealed that "ScreenFlow records to an intermediate codec, [...] it's not a codec the end user will ever see. It's a way of compressing everything that's going on into one file and then decompressing that." The developer explained that when a Mac user is running ScreenFlow, "the CPU's [are] not getting killed, the GPU's [are] not getting killed," and it ultimately "feels like your machine is normal because we're running this internal codec that's saving everything to disk as efficiently as we could conceive of," Vara's founder claims.
Carnine also noted that the codec does its "best capture at 30 fps" with little impact on the machine. "...that's what we saw as the Holy Grail," Carnine concluded.