Using PNGs for Titles and Keystrokes in ScreenFlow

This is a short tutorial on how to use PNG files for titling and for displaying key strokes with ScreenFlow. If you're a regular ScreenFlow user, you're aware of the software's shortcomings in these two areas. It's rumored that help is on the way in the next release, but in the meantime, let's take a quick look at how we can use the transparent qualities of a PNG file for displaying titles and keystrokes. First, open a graphics editor like Photoshop. If you're going to be producing a series of titles or slides for overlaying, consider using just one master file with multiple layers that you can show and hide as you save each out for web. Scraster Professional Screencasting always creates a template file of the dimension of the video. This way, using ScreenFlow's snapping, it's easy to center the images on the canvas. To make your titles pop, consider using some of features like stroke or drop shadow. It might be helpful for you to use a white background on another layer while your working, but keep in mind that our goal is transparency. So when you're happy with the image, use the keyboard shortcut of click apple+option+shift+s to save for web and save the file out to a dedicated folder that holds your slides. Curious where those keystroke images came from? Well that's actually part of what we're explaining here, and we'll get to that in a moment. So now that we have our title slide saved out of PhotoShop, we can bring it into our ScreenFlow project. Go to your Media Library, add Media, navigate to the file, open it, and it's now in the library. Assuming you'd like your tranparent image at the forefront, drag it to your timeline above all the other tracks. Snap it in place, and that's it. Now the keystrokes images are PNGs just like the title slide we just created. You can download a free set of PNG keyboard icons for both PC or Mac keyboards at keyboardicons.com, where you can also pay for a premium set of vector-based keyboard icons. It's important to remember that ScreenFlow ...