MacOS gameplay recording & editing

To record my gameplay videos I primarily used the screen recorder built into MacOS QuickTime Player.  Out of the box it will record full screen (2560x1440) to H.264 with AAC audio.  It even has a simple timeline editor built in so I could lop off the pre-game warm-up and the post-game portion or save just a funny moment for the blooper reel.

What it couldn't out-of-the-box is record the in-game audio, only my microphone.  For that I needed to install and configure SoundFlower which would intercept the normal default system audio and combine it with my microphone and present it to QuickTime Player as a single audio source.  The disadvantage is when Soundflower was in use it disabled the normal volume controls.  So we had to disable SoundFlower to use the internal speakers and then I'd have to remember to re-enable SoundFlower before recording.

Unfortunately, the recording process would occasionally glitch and leave me with a corrupted recording.  I suspect this was due to the recording process being resource starved and the QuickTime container format being fragile due to the complex indexing it uses.

For more complex editing (e.g. dual view) and intro / outro creation I used ffmpeg scripts.  While ffmpeg is often use for simple conversions, it has the ability to perform complex operations including overlaying one video on top of another.  OTOH, I couldn't figure out a way to do timeline editing (e.g. fast fowarding part of the game) without multiple time consuming encoding passes.  (I could never figure out how to concatenate two H.264 videos without re-encoding.)  I even used ffmpeg for adding the titles to my YouTube thumbnails.

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