Multi-track video effects with ScreenFlow

Commenting on my recent review of ScreenFlow, my esteemed colleague David Battino wondered if this screencast recording software could also serve as a replacement for Apple's iMovie for quickly editing videos. The short answer to that is, no, ScreenFlow can't replace iMovie, but -- it does have some tricks up its sleeve that you can use to create cool effects not found in iMovie.

The longer answer to David's question is that, in principle, ScreenFlow does have the required basic features for using it as a simple movie editor, like cutting clips and arranging them on the time line. However, the set of video transitions is limited to fades, resizing, panning, and rotating the movie pane in 3D space, and there are no iMovie-like video or audio effects whatsoever.

What's more, in its current incarnation, handling the transitions that ScreenFlow does offer -- "Video Actions" in ScreenFlow-speak -- is a bit awkward, as they cannot be copied. Consequently, every Video Action you add to a video track is created with default settings for duration, etc., so you have to manually fine-tune each and every one of 'em, and you can't save templates for these Actions, either.

Still, ScreenFlow has one specific feature that sets it apart from iMovie and, even with the limited set of transitions, lets you create some very cool video effects. That feature is multiple video tracks.

Editing one of four video tracks in a ScreenFlow project

In iMovie, video clips are arranged on a single video track, meaning that you can only place a video project's clips in sequence on that single time line. Not so in ScreenFlow: you can have multiple video tracks and individually place each track's video on the canvas of the movie you're creating. The only limitation is the performance of your computer, because, according to the developers, there is no hard-coded limit to the number of simultaneous video tracks you can use in a ScreenFlow project.

Thanks to the flexible settings for a video's size, placement, opacity, and layering in ScreenFlow, creating picture-in-picture videos or even mosaics with multiple videos is a snap. Add animitation to the mix -- independently for each track, of course! --, and you can create some seriously cool effects!

If a picture's worth a thousand words, then a video's worth a cool 50k per second (depending on frame rate, of course...), so here's a quick example of a few of the things you can do in ScreenFlow, and can't in iMovie.

Unfortunately, getting to the result shown in the example movie is very tedious. The main obstacle to an effective workflow for this kind of editing is ScreenFlow's lack of copy-n-paste functionality for the "Video Actions" that generate all these transitions and animations, as mentioned earlier already. As a result, being able to flexibly configure each video action is both a gift and a curse (my apologies to Adrian M.), because you not only can fine-tune each transition individually, you must.

For example, should you decide that you'd like to swap two video clips in a project -- say, the top right and bottom left in the example movie above -- you cannot just move them on the Canvas and copy all the edits from one track and apply it to the other to preserve video positions, animations and transitions. Instead, you have to manually re-create every one of the Actions for both videos.

But let's not forget, though, that ScreenFlow was never designed for this kind of usage. It's a welcome by-product of its support for picture-in-picture movies, e.g., for showing the presenter's face while demonstrating a piece of software. And yet, if you're willing to invest a bit of time and effort, it does make for some very cool effects for your videos that you simply cannot create in iMovie. And, as you could see in the example, the resulting video quality is excellent.

To learn more about ScreenFlow, have a look at my review and visit the ScreenFlow website.

Have you also found unusual ways to coerce a piece of creative software into doing something that it originally was not designed for? Please share. Comments are open below, and there's also a discussion thread welcoming your stories.