Posted by jskopek 6 days ago
The recent video I did for Cling for example (https://lowtechguys.com/cling) I’ve had many people ask about how I did it because it has just the right amount of motion and highlighting. I did it in a few minutes of editing in the ScreenStudio UI.
I’m not saying it’s a great video, but people say it conveys the info well enough and that’s what matters. It would have taken me days to do the same with DaVinci Resolve because of my inexperience with complex editors.
A $30/month subscription is indeed too much, but I see it as a one time payment for that month when I release something, then I pause the subscription. I need it rarely, very few videos need zooming and motion.
Anyway I love to see alternatives like OpenScreen! What I would miss the most would be presets, not sure if it’s already there, but it’s a nice quality of life feature to have a consistent look to the motion effects between videos.
I know why the capital class loves MRR I'm just mad that OTC is ignored.
One-shot option seems attractive, but the desktop (MacOS at least) app market is actually so niche that the SAM is somewhere in the low thousands. So, if I would offer a one-time 100$ app, I'd have 100k$ before taxes. And for that revenue, there's developing, marketing, plus support and maintenance. So to match a dev's salary, I'd need to make 2-3 successful apps a year, that I'd also have to maintain for a long time.
I think maybe there's a mid-ground with buy forever, 1 year updates, so people get the product they paid for, and if they want updates or support the development they can re-buy, however I'm yet to hear opinions on this model.
As far as desktop software is concerned, I think this a commonly accepted approach. Sublime Text is probably the most notable example.
Personally I like the model, as long as old versions stay truly static and don't get enshittification updates. It aligns incentives on feature development far better than subscription models: if you make genuine improvements you get recurring sales, if you don't then existing users will just stay on the old version. And existing users are protected from features or UI changes they disagree with
I would be happy to pay $100 for unlimited access and be locked into the current version of the app, maybe only have minor version updates free so you don’t get locked into a buggy version.
But that’s a more complicated licensing model to implement I guess.
I’m cautious of adding subscription products i would depend on to my tools but if it’s something I definitely only need once a year I just buy a month of it.
Although $30/mo is a bit much for what it does. So if they did go one off presumably it would be about $500 a license.
I'd probably do it with arrows or fading out parts of the screen instead.
And these recording editors don’t have arrows and callouts, not even a freeze frame. I have to plan the recording to the letter and after 10 frustrating takes I just say fk it and try to polish the least confusing take
Maybe I should start contributing to openscreen to get the ideal recording editor people are looking for instead of paying and complaining.
After experiencing many bugs and UX oddities with both of those, I went back to ScreenStudio.
ScreenStudio is reliable and produces the best results for my use case (educational content and client updates)
This is a classic question to every paid software. The answer is it depends.
If I think something is worth the money, I typically don't need to actively decide to pause the subscription each time I use it.
But if I was that kind of user who did demos monthly, the time saved on one or two videos that month is worth $30.
Now I'm both locked in to paying every month, and can't keep using the app as it was when I bought it, because it auto updates and most apps will invariably have a server component that will quickly become incompatible with old app versions.
I hate the direction of "we'll force you to update even if you don't like the new direction, and we'll force you to pay for the privilege", so I'm voting with my wallet on this.
OpenStudio apparently is and I'm hyped.
Thought it came out pretty good
Screen Studio (and so OpenScreen as well) are "opinionated" and are designed to create aesthetic videos with minimal configuration. They can't do a lot of the things that OBS can do, but if all you want is to record your desktop with a webcam overlay, it's a lot easier.
OpenScreen is more about screen recording, once recorded it turns into a simple-ish NLE that is focused on editing screen-casts.
I just downloaded this and had a zoom effect video from the first attempt. The learning curve is roughly zero.
I just tried Open Screen but it didn't work on my machine (Cachy OS) - it didn't detect the screen or my microphone. Hopefully it gets better
Since it's much easier to port source code to other languages now, I'd love to see more projects like written in Swift, or C#.
Just tried the AppImage version on Linux, simple to use, and works Ok on my end.
Suggest you add preferences dropdown to floating bar, and ability to highlight parts of an area for record, ability to set the default save location or change it at will. Also noted that though I closed the app via the customary way, and removed the AppImage, the apps ICON remained present in GNOME's notification area.
Will keep an eye on its progress since OBS (what I used) seems to have stopped receiving updates :)
No it hasn't: https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/commits/master/
Having said that, and reading your reply, I stand corrected and I take it back as I did an update and the error is nowhere to be found. Not sure how the runtime was updated to the latest, 25.08, but assume it was the obs project.
:)