How To Make iPhone Screencasts With Quicktime.
If you want to explain how to do something on a computer, smartphone or tablet screen, the best way is to do a screencast. YouTube is full of examples like this showing you how to do your best in technology.
A screencast is a video of you doing something on your screen. You can add your voice to give instructions to the viewer, or you can simply silence them by letting the action speak everything. However, making them can be tricky. It all depends on the software you choose to use.
For Apple users, the best software is Quicktime. This is Apple’s default video player built into all versions of macOS.
This is often overlooked in favor of more powerful alternatives like VLC Player, but I’m a big fan of Quicktime. There was a Windows version not long ago, but in 2016 it was stopped by Apple.
Make screenshots using Quicktime on macOS
It is very easy to create screencasts in macOS Quicktime if you know which buttons to click. Once that’s done, Quicktime will generate a video file for you, and you can post it to YouTube or send it to someone via a file transfer service.
For the purposes of this article, I’ll take a quick screencast of my iPhone’s screen in Quicktime to show you how it all works.
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- The first step is to get a USB Lightning cable and connect your iPhone to your Mac.
- Now open Quicktime on your Mac. You will find it in the Applications folder.
- When it opens, go to File New Movie Recording. For some strange reason, this doesn’t work if you select New Screen Recording.
- The Quicktime Player interface now displays with a red button in the middle with an arrow pointing down. If you click on it, you will see that you have the option to switch cameras and microphones. In both cases, your iOS device should be listed.
Council. If your iOS device doesn’t appear, unplug it from the Lightning cable and plug it back in. If that still doesn’t work, lock and then unlock your device. If the screen displays a PIN, an error often occurs. You can also try turning Quicktime off and on again.
- Switch the camera and microphone to the name of your iOS device. When you do, Quicktime will immediately change screens and show your iOS screen on your Mac. If you plan on dubbing in your screencast, leave the microphone setting at Internal microphone .
- If you hover over the Quicktime screen, the video recording options reappear.
- If you want to start recording your screen, just press the red button in Quicktime and the recording will start. From now on, every time you do something on the iOS screen, it will repeat and record on the Mac screen.
- When you finish your screencast, press the record button again and the recording will stop. If you’re happy with that, save the file as a .MOV file. No file conversion is required, but if you want something a little smaller, perhaps consider converting the file to .MP4 using Handbrake.
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