iOS screen capture in Yosemite

jonmulcahy

Hi Everyone,

Just wanted to bring this to everyone's attention if they don't already know:

Plug any iOS 8 device into your Mac using a Lightning cable and Yosemite lets you record screen activity quickly and easily. With the device connected, open the QuickTime Player app, choose File and New Screen Recording, then select your mobile device from the drop-down list next to the record button.

I would imagine that the quality should be fantastic as it is going over the lighting cable instead of wifi, but I have not tried it myself.

jorkos

yes it is great, very useful

gingagaming

Sounds great! Im still wary of upgrading to Yosemite. Seems that people are complaining of GS being slow? I normally upgrade but Ive held off this time. Whats your experience with Jon? Are you currently using the software or just active on the forums?

jonmulcahy

I have not noticed any real difference since switching to Yosemite, scrolling through an actor with 100's of rules might be a little shuddery, but I've always found that to be the case. I'm working with the latest RC on my game, and really can't complain.

I am running this on a late 2013 retina macbook pro, so it is a powerful machine, which I'm sure helps. but that has always been the case with GS. It's a resource hungry app.

Armelline

using a Lightning cable

Dammit.

Seems people are complaining of GS being slow?

GS is always slow :P I find I do have to restart the application a little more regularly, but I'm chugging away quite happily now with just a Yosemite partition.

That said, I'm very meh about Yosemite overall.

iamcartez

Yosemite: It is slower when it slows down but feels faster when it first loads.

I've been keeping the activity monitor on the screen and after about 30-45 minutes when GS Memory is nearing 1GB, I'll kill the program and reopen it.

Lovejoy

@gingagaming said:
Sounds great! Im still wary of upgrading to Yosemite. Seems that people are complaining of GS being slow? I normally upgrade but Ive held off this time. Whats your experience with Jon? Are you currently using the software or just active on the forums?

GS has been incredibly slow since i upgraded to yosemite. Someone suggested doing a clean install of GS. Will try it later today.

Socks

@jonmulcahy said:
Hi Everyone,

Just wanted to bring this to everyone's attention if they don't already know:

I would imagine that the quality should be fantastic as it is going over the lighting cable instead of wifi, but I have not tried it myself.

The quality is ok, certainly better than a lot of screen capture software, but due to various limitations the quality is still quite limited, I think it'll be fine for a lot of game capture stuff though.

(Did you know iPads 1, 2, and 3 - with the 30pin connector outputs full 1920x1080p via its HDMI stream, whereas iPads 4 onwards only output 1600×900p - this is one of the limitations placed on iDevices by the Lightening connector).

Here's the actual quality in numbers.

Quicktime / various screen capture software - around 10Mbps. 

iOS8/ Yosemite / lightning connector - around 16 Mbps to 8 bit H.264.

Elgato HD - Max 30 Mbps to 8 bit H.264.

New Elgato HD60 - Max 40 Mbps to 8 bit H.264.

New Atomos Ninja Star - Max 220 Mbps to Apple ProRes 10bit 4:2:2

There's a little more about this kind of thing in this thread for anyone who is interested:

http://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/67387/how-do-you-create-high-quality-videos-of-your-apps

Thunder_Child

Sweet ! I wasn't aware that the Yosimite was out. Been waiting to do some screen captures. Thanks for the update.

jigglybean

I've just used Quicktime to record (without sound) and iMovies to make a trailer and man, its superb. Still finding my way around but for a basic Mac user who is new - its a decent piece of kit. Garageband does audio, so will be trying that out next. Trailer inbound!

Socks

@jigglybean said:
I've just used Quicktime to record (without sound) . . .

When in record mode, there is a triangle to the right of the record button, click it to see your audio recording options . . . I use SoundFlower, a free audio routing application, to send the Mac's sound to QuickTime so QuickTime records video and system audio.

robertkdale

Yeah its great. I have uploaded some video using this feature. Works perfectly

gingagaming

Thanks for all your input guys. I think im going to hang on the fence a little longer though.

jigglybean

@gingagaming‌ - I've just upgraded and had zero problems. Even assigned an app, after I updated to Java 8 (had to, so Mr AppleMac told me) and I was bricking it....but it all worked out fine.

Pretty impressed how smooth it has been from recording in quick-time ( you can even drag to select where you want to record - not sure if you can do this before, but that was handy), and then imovies.

Just downloaded final cut pro trial and scratching my head.

Marchief

Been running Yosemite since developer preview 2, no issues with Gamesalad after preview 6 and 12.4, completed and submitted my app in developer preview 7 and Gamesalad 12.5, now running Yosemite gm 3 and Gamesalad 12.9 and still no issues. Yosemite is a big improvement on maveriks.

Lovejoy

After reinstalling GSC it was been running way better on yosemite.