Hi there,

I was just testing out a demo version of Snapz Pro and was wondering if there was any quicker way of saving the movies that Snapz Pro creates. I am currently looking at doing full screen (MacBook Pro) captures with both audio track and microphone tracks and quite long movies.

For a 4 minute capture that I tried it took over 9 minutes. I understand that this is an intensive programming request but was just wondering if there is any way to speed that part of the process up?

Also does anyone have any figures or tests as to if there is any problem with doing really really long captures of movies using Snapz. I am a bit worried that if I go and take say a 40 minute capture that when I come to saving it I might have a crash or something and lose everything that I was doing?

Any help with any of this would be greatly appreciated as I am looking at purchasing very soon and would just like to clear up these points first.

Best wishes,

S2AD

Hello-
There really isn't anything we can do on this end to speed up the saving process - it's all done by QuickTime. What we do have in the works is batch processing, so you can record a bunch of movies, and then process them all at once at a more convenient time.

The main limitation of recording length is space on your Startup drive. To determine the size of the raw file, use this as a pretty good guesstimate:

width X height of selected area = # pixels per frame

# pixels per frame X bytes per pixel (determined by color depth: thousand of colors = 2, millions of colors = 4) = # bytes per frame

# bytes per frame X frame rate = bytes per second

bytes per second X duration = total raw video file.

Of course audio files add to the raw file size.

Keep in mind, when SP X hands the file off to QT, QT then takes that raw file, and uses the info to create a QuickTime, .mov file, but it doesn't get rid of the raw file until the save is complete, so at the end you actually need room for the raw files, and the final movie.

One other limitation is if you are recording an audio track, SP X actually writes the raw audio to an AIFF file. AIFF files have a built in limit of 2 gigs, so if you are recording a movie with an audio track, you will lose the audio if the raw audio file exceeds 2 gigs.

For audio file size,

sample rate of 44,1 kHz X (bit depth - 2 for 16 bit, and 1 for 8 bit) X 2 (for stereo) or 1 for (mono)/second of audio recorded.

Hi David,

Thanks for the reply and the file size calculations. Snapz Pro X is a fantastic utility and I should be purchasing it very soon based on the results I have gleened from the demo.

Thanks again.

S2AD

Hello-
You're welcome. Glad to hear SP X is working out for you!