I need to produce demonstration video screencasts for my iPhone app... I'm referring to those such as this one for the Reddit iPhone app (the one on the right, not the YouTube video).
I'm assuming the best way to do this is to record the simulator using a screen recording utility, does anyone have any other methods? What tools have you used successfully?
The author of Tweetie recently wrote a post about what he does, and a tool he wrote called SimFinger. Yes, it does record the simulator. If I were producing an iPhone screencast, that's where I would start.
For my screencast here, I ran the application in the iPhone Simulator and recorded it all using ScreenFlow. I can't recommend ScreenFlow highly enough, as it really simplifies the whole process. ScreenFlow records your entire screen, but it provides excellent editing capabilities for cropping the video to the relevant 320 x 480 (or 480 x 320) section, as well as fading in and out title graphics or lettering. I also used SimFinger just to provide a good cursor, but I see that the latest release of ScreenFlow now has that capability built-in.
For a microphone, I actually used the USB one from Rock Band. It's a surprisingly good Logitech microphone that's recognized as soon as you plug it into your Mac.
I needed to do a little post-processing of the MP4 output to make sure that the video could be played natively on the iPhone. I've used both VisualHub and iMovie to produce MP4 videos with all the right settings to play on the device. Both have simple iPhone export profiles.
For free Mac OS X screen recording with iPhone ad looking results, you can use use the Screenium demo app to record a flawless 30 second video of your iPhone simulator without limitations or overlays. Once you start making money from your app, the full product is cheap. Encoding to iPhone format provides a good lightweight output. Turn off the mouse for SimFinger. You can view an example video at 3k Top Chinese Characters. Definitely use SimFinger to add that realistic shine, and the iPhone device reflection users expect.
Longer term, I will buy the iSimulate iPhone app to see whether interacting with the iPhone's touch screen instead of the mouse to drive the screencast can give smoother, more realistic results (this also has advantages if you use the accelerometer or multitouch).
The solution I'm going with is SimFinger to provide the "finger" and SnapZ Pro X for recording. I read a great excerpt from an upcoming book on HTML 5 that convinced me that I should take the extra step of transcoding the .mov output from SnapZ Pro to Ogg for viewing in browsers that don't support .mov files. Get the XiphQT Quicktime component (I'd link to it, but I'm currently prevented from posting more than one link -- go to xiph.org), and QuickTime Player 7 will do the transcoding for you - no QuickTime Pro needed!
ScreenFlow looks great, but I already had SnapZ Pro and can't currently justify $99 when I can do it just as well with what I've got plus some free downloads.
Loren Brichter the developer of Tweetie2 the awesome iPhone Twitter app, wrote this little app to make screen casts look legit! Check it out.
http://blog.atebits.com/2009/03/not-your-average-iphone-screencast/
I love things that make amateurs look like pros :)
RG