1. iMovie

Tips on how to use Mac's iMovie to produce livecoding screencasts.

1.1 Editing a screencast on a mac using iMovie

Often the audio I get from a screencast recording is rather weak.

There's an easy way to fix that by using iMovie, which normally comes with any Mac. Here are the steps:

1. Open the livecoding video in iMovie
2. Detach Audio (right-click on movie bar to see the options menu)
3. Adjust the volume in the audio track editor, by dragging the mouse up/down (avoid red zones!)
   1. Additionally, you can try using the top left menu: Music Settings > Equalizer > Music Enhance
4. Save the new movie: Share > File
   • Resolution: 720p 60
   • Quality: High
   • Compress: Faster

Results: For a 10 mins video, that gives me a .mp4 file of ~250M

Upload to YouTube and off you go ;-)

1.2 Adding backgrounds

I often use Hydra to create interesting backgrounds, and then overlay them on the livecoding video.

1. Launch Hydra and pick some visuals you like
2. Save as local movie file (eg .mov using QuickTime and 'screen capture')
3. Import into iMovie

You can easily add video overlay effects in iMovie on a iOS device. In particular the Green/Blue Screen effect can be handy:

Green/Blue Screen: Adds the clip so that during playback, the clip appears with the green-screen or blue-screen parts of the clip removed, and the remaining parts of the clip are superimposed on the main clip in the timeline.

First menu on the left: