Screenflow’s narration function is one I hadn’t tried until recently despite having used this excellent screen recording software by Telestream for some years. My partner’s driving instruction business is on corvid 19 lockdown pause right now so she decided to shoot some videos for her pupils meantime. So, armed with a head mounted Gopro she took to the road. The original plan was to add a better quality voice over separately but the Screenflow’s narration function proved to be a simpler option. Here’s how it works.
After importing your video into Screenflow and doing the usual top and tailing you may want to detach and delete the rough audio. In our case we wanted to keep the road noise from the video. Detaching the Audio gave us control over its volume in relation to the voiceover.
Better Quality Audio
The next step is to rehearse what you want to say at a given point in your video. You might even want to script this. We found it easiest to work in short sections. Then we hooked up my Snowball usb microphone – you could use an audio interface with whatever mic you have. Move the timeline marker to the point where you want to start narrating and navigate to >Insert > narration.
In the window that appears you can select the input source. If you want to put an automatic time limit on the narration you can do that here too. You can also choose to mute any other audio you have in the project during your voiceover recording.
When ready, hit the little red record dot and you’ll see a little 3 second countdown timer. Then start your narration. When finished just hit the stop button and your narration will appear. You will also have the option to keep or discard the recording after having a listen.
One of the really nice features of Screenflow’s narration function is that if you choose discard at this stage the timeline will snap right back to where it was before the recording. This saves you having to mess around looking for the right place again.
Total Time Saver
Just repeat the process as many times as necessary until you have a finished project. You can now adjust the volume of your narration and add effects if you so desire.
Having discovered this function I can see me using it a lot. Its a lot quicker than my usual method of recording a voiceover on a separate device and importing it into Screenflow. I can still get high quality audio but in fewer steps.
Just another reason I love Screenflow.
