How to record your screen to make iPad app tutorials
Recording audio and video on the iPad
For some time now I have been looking at finding a solution to recording the audio and video on the iPad. Finally a fairly good and inexpensive solution has appeared. The way to record your iPad video is to use an application called Display Rec. Up until now there were only more expensive possibilities that is required buying the latest iPad or also the latest video breakout hardware. Now you have an app available in the iTunes App Store that does a reasonable job of capturing video from your iPad.
A test recording of video from the iPad
My first set of tests of the application Display Rec on the iPad looks very promising indeed. I have been using it with the iPad 1 and the only problem would be, if you want to record your screen, is the need for an iPad with a little more horsepower. I feel sure that to do an iPad screen recording it will work a whole lot better with a later model iPad. At least now it is possible to do some sort of iPad screencast with a cheap screencast recorder for iPad.
How to record your screen of your iPad
If you want to learn how to record your screen it is no longer necessary to break out a huge wad of cash. Head on down to the iTunes App Store and grab a copy of Display Rec. With this application you can make recordings of the video from your iPad, to an iPod video recording to use in screencast. The methods that were used in the past meant that you either have to jailbreak your iPad, or use software that would push the video out to another Apple computer over Wi-Fi. It may also have been possible to do an iPad screen recording by using a fairly expensive breakout box device. I know of two applications that allow you to record iPad screen video and one of them is called Reflection. When you can see the video mirror of what is happening on your iPad on your Macintosh computer, you can record it using your favourite screen capture application. The one that I prefer to users called ScreenFlow.
You can set the quality of the recorded video and also the size of the video in the settings in the Display recorder app. If you need to thou can put in a Max Duration, which might be useful if you have limited space on your device. I have also recorded from the iPhone 4 with this app.
How to record your screen using Display Rec. All you need to do is to start the application on your iPad and then open up the application you wish to record. I demonstrated this in a video about a Byword for iPad and the resulting video was very usable indeed. I was able to get the video onto my Mac via iTunes and although I could use an application like Final Cut Pro X, for quick cutting and editing are used ScreenFlow. When I had finished editing in ScreenFlow, I exported out and did the top and tail of the video in Final Cut.
Display Rec iPad screen recorder pros and cons
The advantages of using Display Rec is that it is a very cheap application to buy and the resulting video is easily good enough to make a watchable screencast. There are not many disadvantages other than you may run into problems if you want to record an application that is for recording audio. I did try to record a video using this iPad screen recorder, Display Rec, of the application that works with the iRig microphone. It seemed that it was doing the recording but when I have finished it was unable to put together anything that I could use. It did look like a video file had been created and I tried to open it in a number of video manipulation applications on the Mac. Each time I tried it seemed that I had just got a video file that was corrupted and useless. During one of my tests I wanted to record the application Tweetbot for iOS and on my iPod 1, I found that the application ran very slowly. The Tweetbot application also crashed and stopped working during this test. If I were using the third-generation iPad I may not run into this problem. I used to use Twittelator Pro before I switched to Tweetbot for iOS and there is now a Tweetbot for Mac.
How to create an iPad video recording
You now know how to record your screen on the iPad and it is possible to edit this in iMovie. iMovie which is made for the nonprofessional type of user, but gives very professional results. The thing to do is to connect a decent microphone to the iPad rather than use the inbuilt microphone. This will give you a much better sounding voice over track. If you don’t have a good microphone to connect to the iPad, then use the internal microphone and replace the soundtrack when editing on your Apple Mac computer. The same advice goes for recording audio with your Mac, always use an external microphone for good rich sounding audio.
I have used Display Rec to meet just one YouTube video so far and I can say that I am pleased with the results. It does what it is supposed to do, that is to record iPad screen video. I plan to continue using this iPad screencast recorder to make YouTube video tutorials and if I run into any major difficulties I will add an update to this post. Mac20Q gives Display Rec a thumbs up if you want to know how to record your screen of your iPad. The
