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Do I need iShowU HD?

Neil Clayton Feb 17, 2009

 

 

Overview

Of course you do!  OK, seriously ...

iShowU HD is a complete ground up re-write of the original iShowU.  It comes in HD and HD Pro versions, the later providing watermarking, keyboard compositing, better audio support and more Final Cut presets (see the feature comparison).

Over v1, the most important features are: Faster realtime encoding1, on the fly GPU based scaling, watermarking, iSight / USB camera usage and uploading to social networks (Blip.TV and YouTube at the time of writing).

Can I use it?

iShowU HD uses a bunch of neat Leopard only features and so runs only on 10.5 (Leopard) systems.  On top of that it uses some reasonably new graphics card features.  As a result in order to run iShowU HD you need:

  1. An Intel or G5 Mac computer
  2. OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Why would I want to use it?
While we can't answer this fully (we're not you!) we would suggest:
  1. You want to show your users what keys you're pressing.  HD Pro is the one for you.
  2. You've got company logos and so on that you want to overlay onto your recordings without having to do so later on (and go through a length encode process).  Again, HD Pro is for you.
  3. You want to personalize your screen capture.  Use your iSight!
  4. You like having the latest new and whizy tools!  
  5. You need discrete audio channel recording (so you can fix stuff ups in tools like Soundtrack Pro).  HD Pro records all channels separately.
  6. You want to capture web pages (tall windows...). See the "Slide" mouse mode and the video explaining it all.
How do I buy it?
If you're an existing user you can get a discount on HD or HD Pro at the webstore.  Just go to the purchase page, and then click on the upgrades tab.  Log in, and the available upgrades will be shown to you.  Add to your cart as normal, and you're away!


Footnotes

1 - Depends on the compression method.  Apple Intermediate and H264 are two common YUV based codecs for which iShowU HD will be up to 15% faster.  The speed increased depends on a number of factors including machine speed, capture size and requested fps.

 

 

 
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