How To Make Screenshare Videos With Free Software

On all platforms. Mac/Windows/Linux

Why would in the world would an anon want to make a screenshare video?

You want to show people how to do things. I can think of two big categories here:

1. It will help grow your non-anon business

2. You want to make training videos for internal use with your employees and VAs

In either case, you are going to need to capture your screen and potentially your web cam and audio voiceover so you can explain to people how to do things.

You also ideally want this to be basically a push button process. Its easy to procrastinate when there is a bunch of technical fuss that needs to happen before you can do anything.

Why I’m Migrating Away From Screenflow

I used to use and recommend a paid software tool called Screenflow for this purpose.

It still has some nice features like pointer callouts, but it tends to freeze when I’m making very long videos, the export renderer moves at the speed of smell, as well as lacks a batching function. If you don’t mind this and just want something thats friendly to use with an iMovie-like interface, this still might be a good option, but personally I needed more.

Other bummer, is it is Mac only.

The Software You Can Use Instead

Screenflow combines screen capture functionality with a basic editor.

Instead, you can use OBS and the editor of your choice like Adobe Premiere (paid) or Davinci Resolve (free or paid) which are better suited for that task anyway. The other benefit is this opens up a Linux-based workflow with OBS + Resolve.

OBS stands for Open Broadcaster Software.

OBS is free, open source software.

If you want to check out the code or contribute, the OBS Github is here and you can also support the project financially on Patreon.

OBS is more known among people who do a lot of livestreaming, which it is very capable of! You can have different scenes, transitions, different camera sources, and all the other core elements of a live switched stream.

But today we’re going to be setting it up to record a screen capture.

How To Set Up For Screen Cap

First, you’ll need to Download OBS. Installing on OSX or Windows is typically like any other application. If you’re on Linux I’m going to assume you know how to troubleshoot simple things like this yourself.

Open OBS and look in the lower left for the Scenes pane. Each scene can have a variety of video and audio inputs you composite together.