[Contest] BB FlashBack Professional [Forum Exclusive]

Blueberry (BB) FlashBack is versatile screen recorder software. It is very useful in creating demos, tutorials or even recording webcasts / online training sessions. BB FlashBack comes in three versions – Express, Standard and Professional. Below are the differences as per the developer:

1. Express is free and enables you to record the screen, sound, webcam, share movies online or save them as Flash and AVI files.

2. Standard edition adds annotation and WMV, QuickTime, and iPod/Phone compatible MPEG4 exporting

3. Professional edition adds powerful audio and video editing, EXE export and effects like zoom and pan.

The installation is very smooth and hardly requires any effort from the user. It takes ~60mb of disk space.

Let us go through each feature one by one.

1. Recording

You have three options for screen recording: full screen, a window or region. In addition to screen, you could also record the microphone / PC sound and webcam. It has three recording modes namely, GDI, MPEG and Capture driver to get the best performance from a variety of PCs and situations. You could adjust the frames recorded per second for GDI and MPEG modes.

BB FlashBack is intelligent to select the best recording mode if nothing is selected.

It can record continuously, saving just the last X minutes to decrease file size, and it can schedule hands-off recordings to start at a certain time or when a specific application is run.

See below for recording options:

2. Sharing / Output formats

The recorded movies are saved in BB’s proprietary format, which is .fbr. See below:

After recording, it shows options to either play the movie or export to one of the following formats (see below):

Flash

QuickTime (H264)

Windows Media Video (WMV)

AVI

MPEG4

Standalone EXE

MS Powerpoint (PPT)

Additionally, you could opt to either export the complete recorded movie or a few specific frames. You could also set frame rate, scaling and various other options.

BB FlashBack also has an inbuilt uploading movies option to some popular video hosting sites such as YouTube, Blip.tv, Viddler and Revver. In addition to uploading to video sharing sites, it also enables you to upload movies to a FTP server and/or to a location on your PC or LAN using FileCopy option.

3. Annotation

BB FlashBack provides various annotation options such as adding textboxes, images, sound files or record a new commentary, interactive buttons, highlight, arrows, watermark image and AVI or WMV file as picture-in-picture video. I have used some of them in my sample-recorded video below:

4. Effects

BB FlashBack provides following effects:

Cursor highlighting

Zoom and Pan

Cropping the movie area

Add start and end titles

Autoscroll to keep the mouse in view

5. Editing

This is the most sought feature by all of us. This feature comes only in the PRO version. It lets you fine-tune your movies, edit multi track sound and video side-by-side. Without editing your movies/tutorials will never have a professional touch. Instead of re-doing the work/recording BB FlashBack editing feature allows to correct various mishaps such as noise, out of sync sound, and removing unwanted sections.

Shortcomings:

1. It does not have an option to do a multiple export.
Do you mean export multiple movies at once? FB does have a “Batch export” utility that can export any number of movies to a specific format and settings. You get to it via the File menu.

2. You will only be able to export to Powerpoint format if you have Office 2000 (or newer) including Powerpoint installed on your PC. This is a constraint as Office 2000 (or newer) is a paid software (and costly too).

3. Exporting to QuickTime requires that you have QuickTime 7 or newer installed. Again a constraint to have additional software installed.

In summary, I found BB FlashBack a feature packed recording software. It is light on system resources and easy to use. The features provided in the PRO version are comparable to other software’s in the category. The recorded movie/demos are that of professional quality and sharing the same is easy. I’m sure you will love using it.

Official website

Reviewed by Grr

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