Appletell

Yvonne sent us a question asking how long the recently reviewed screen capture software, ScreenFlow, can record for. We asked the screenflow developers, and here’s what they said.

“We don’t know the limit.

“We’ve internally recorded several recordings over 1 hour (recording movies playing on screen so we always have something to record).  These recordings
exported just fine, and we’ve just not tried to go farther.  We assume 99% of folk are never going to go more than the length of a college lecture.  And probably 80% will never go over 2 minutes…

“Our reasoning for doing 1 hour tests was that given how our internal structures work, if we can make it past 36 minutes, we’ve “gone over” the potential gotchas of the internal engine.  So we doubled that to be sure. We also tested to get file sizes greater than 2 gig, which again is another potential gotcha.

“So there is no internal limit on the recording side.

“I’d say “several hours” would be reasonable to expect.

“If you want theoretical limits, they get funny pretty quickly.

“Why?  Well, we do have an internal int32 frame counter.  So after 2147483647 frames, we’d start showing black frames.  Assuming 30 frames per second. That would mean 71582788 seconds worth of frames which is about 2.26 years. I think you’d run out of disk space.

“And the disk space one gets even funnier to start running scenarios on paper with—but that starts to depend on how much motion is on screen and how big the screen is, etc.  So I’m not going to get into it here.

“Really, just [...] fire up the demo and record it for a half hour and make sure it works for them…

“Sometimes the simplest answer is to just see.”

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