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Screenflick IconCreating Timelapse Recordings

Screenflick makes recording long time-lapse recordings very efficient, using a relatively small amount of disk space and performance capability, while sipping energy laptop battery power. This efficiency leaves more performance power and battery life for the applications actually being recorded.

To create a timelapse screen recording:

  1. Launch Screenflick
  2. Reduce the Capture Rate for maximum efficiency*
  3. Start and finish a screen recording as you normally would
  4. Select the recording in the Export view
  5. Select the "Time" options view in the bottom right of the window
  6. Change the Timelapse value from "Normal" to "Times Faster" and enter the desired speed-up (eg "10" for a 10x speed up)
  7. Playback or export the recording

*Reducing the Capture Rate proportionally to the amount of expected speed-up maximizes the efficiency of the recording process. If a 10x speed-up, then reduce the Capture Rate about 10x; ex. 30 fps reduced by 10x would be 3 fps, so choose 5 fps. Note that recording at a slightly higher fps than necessary gives you a little more flexibility to increase the speed-up later while still being smooth.


Maximizing Efficiency

Normal real-time recordings typically use 30 or 60 frames per second. When creating a timelapse however, recording that many frames is wasteful. If you were to want to speed up the recording by 10x, you would only need 3 frames recorded every second to create a 30 fps final movie, so the other 27+ frames being recorded are never used.