Screencasting for free! On a Mac! Using CamTwist and iMovie!!

[Screencasting] is a nice useful technique where you can record your desktop to try and show something or teach something. The people at [Ruby on Rails] use this technique to good effect :)

I spent ages looking for some stuff to this with on OSX, but the only things recommended by people cost cash :(

So after watching lots of the [Zooomr MKIII launch on ustream] and seeing what Kris was doing with [CamTwist] (which is free!) I had a bit of of a brain wave.

So for a free screencast solution try the following:

  • Download and install [CamTwist]
  • Start [CamTwist] with no effects
  • Start iMovie
  • Flick the switch at the bottom of iMovie to Recording – click on the arrow to select the CamTwist camera
  • Do some recording!

There you go. Just a few things to look out for:

  1. This will beat the life out of your CPU meaning fan noise might be an issue
  2. Export the movie from iMovie in CD quality or it won’t work for most video sites (like [vimeo])

15 thoughts on “Screencasting for free! On a Mac! Using CamTwist and iMovie!!”

  1. Thanks for this – really useful! I too had been looking for a a free screencasting solution on the Mac, and this technique works surprisingly well.

  3. I have been looking all over for info on how to use cam twist. Finally someone that tell you how to use it rather then hype up the things it can do, thanks.

  4. Thanks for the advice here–this sounds great. The only problem is that I can’t seem to get iMovie to recognize the comtwist camera. The only camera it’s showing is the built-in iSight camera. What do I need to do to import with the camtwist camera? Thanks!

  7. I’m having the same problem using OS X version 10.5.4 with CamTwist 1.7 and iMovie 7.1.4 with the built-in iSight camera in my MacBook Pro. The curious thing is that ooVoo has no problem seeing CamTwist as an alternative to iSight, but iMovie makes iSight the only option. Maybe I’m doing something wrong, but I start iMove and click the camera icon to bring up the import window, and at the bottom the drop-down list next to “Camera:” shows only “Built-in iSight.” Is there some other place to specify a video source?

  9. I took your advice and also did some more research on my own, and here’s the story:

    The new version of iMovie (and also iChat) doesn’t play well with CamTwist or third party drivers in general, which is an annoyance. I haven’t found a completely free way to capture CamTwist output without backing up to iMovie HD. But there are at least a couple of not-too-expensive alternatives. One is QuickTime Pro, which costs $30 (just for a license code to unlock the capabilities in the QuickTime you already have, gripe, gripe).

    Another is something called iCamShare. It’s $15 shareware, so I tried it tonight, and it works just fine with CamTwist. It appears mainly aimed at families emailing short videos to each other and hence it’s very limited, simple, and easy to use, but it supports a good number of output codecs. I don’t have enough experience to really recommend it, but it is at least free to try, so for anybody else in my position it might be the closest you can get to free (at least from what I’ve been able to find).

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  11. Hey I’ve read people were having some trouble with the new imovie and camtwist. You could just download imovieHD http://support.apple.com/downloads/iMovie_HD_6
    It has a lot more effects than the new imovie, and is pretty much a better program. I tried it, and it seems to recognize camtwist as a different camera, you just need to make sure that you start camtwist before imovieHD.

    Hope that helped.

  12. I have iMovie 09 and whatever the newest version of leopard is…CamTwist is not recognized…and everything else i try to get costs money…i’m trying to find a better way to show my dad how to use his mac as well as discuss with him some attributes to a site I am building for our church so i really don’t want to pay…help?

  14. as a free solution to the problem of no longer working imovie camera selection, i used gawker to record the video off camtwist and it worked, just needs to be tweaked a little with settings. here’s the link:

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