This was fairly common but not particularly useful since it didn’t escape from the fact that you could barely make out what was happening on screen. If you wanted, you could add a hardware video mixer and a second camera to allow picture-in-picture of the user’s face. Later on, it became fashionable to record onto DVD-Video, which is higher resolution (720×480), but still fairly unreadable. Back in the 1990s it was normal to scale screen footage down to VHS resolution and record it onto tape, making the footage impossibly blurry (1024×768 down to 330×480 is never going to be legible). It might be the industry standard nowadays, but a few years ago things were very different. the webcam footage of the user pulling faces as they do the tasks). One of the big questions you have to ask yourself when looking for a cheap alternative is whether you can live without picture in picture (i.e. This can take hours for big studies, and is best set up as a night-time batch job.
Another downside is that Morae records to a proprietary format (.RDG) which you have to import into a sister app (Morae manager) and then batch export to get shareable video. It’s a bit extreme if all you want is to record footage of a user test for archiving and making highlight clips. The most obvious contender is Morae – but it’s pretty damn expensive at $2000, and has has a whole raft of powerful research features that you might never need. On a Mac, the solution is easy to find – it’s Silverback ($50). a screen recorder that does picture in picture.
ALTERNATIVE TO SCREENFLOW FOR MAC PC
I’ve spoken to a few people recently who want a free / cheap PC app for recording usability tests, i.e.