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I am using a mac and I am using screenflow software to do a screencast about how my web application works. During the demo I click on a lot of buttons and links. In my screencast I have this click noise which is very distracting.

I know using screenflow I can edit the noise. But that is a very laborious process . It would require tracking each and every mouse click and deleting it.

Is there a better to handle the situation.

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Use an external mouse (i.e. not the trackpad on a laptop) and put it under the desk surface on a lap board or book while you're recording... that should lessen it. Additionally, go to a PC store and sample the mice there to see which has the most quiet clicking noise.

Even further, invest in a uni-directional mic so that, while aimed at your mouth, it's not picking up much of any noise around you. Plus, it'll sound better than any built-in mic.

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I would propose two options:

  • Use an expander or, better yet, a multi-band expander on your audio file. Set correctly it will turn down any sounds that occur while you are not talking. this won't help for anything that happens while you are talking, or for anything as loud/louder than your own voice.

  • Consider purchasing a good lavalier microphone that you can clip to your shirt. It will be closer to your face allowing you to turn down the gain on your mic, resulting in all noises (including mouse clicks) being far less audible. Make sure to get a cardioid mic as opposed to an omni-directional mic. This will help reduce sounds from anything the microphone isn't pointing at.

Finally, consider that this clicking sound may be a very helpful auditory cue to your viewers to know when you are clicking something (especially if this is a tutorial type screencast).

Cheers

Blake

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I would use a trackpad instead of a mouse; they're much quieter.

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I have a somewhat different solution: record your audio separately from your screencast, and use a video edit program to put them together. This approach gives you the following advantages:

  • More fluent speech, which you can even pre-transcribe
  • The possibility to edit the audio and video separately
  • Cleaner audio, no clicks or other background noise
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  • You can always edit them separately. But this is good technique anyway. – Sarge Borsch Sep 15 '13 at 11:39
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You won't be able to remove and sounds from your recording without affecting other sounds already in it. While the general frequency range of a click is likely to be much higher than a human voice, there are overtones to each that will be affected when you reduce the volume of the click. You'll have to be especially careful of trying to remove clicks that occur at the same time as any spoken consonants, especially sounds like "t" or "k", which are essentially clicks in themselves.

In the future, definitely use a unidirectional mic, and get it really close to your mouth/sound source. The closer you are to your source, the less you have to turn up the mic, the fewer environmental noises you get. And of course, as others have mentioned, just try to use the quietest mouse that you can.

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When doing online instructional videos with screenflow using a loud 'clicky' mouse, I found that clicking 'remove background noise' in the audio menu & changing that to the 5% minimum helped remove the click noises. To combat the general reduction in volume levels I turned the audio up to 150%. The audio sounds fine to me!

I've tried to split the audio and video recordings in the past and I find it impossible to sync them together in screenflow -which doesn't allow you to 'zoom in' enough to sync perfectly. Of course you could 'detach' the audio and edit it all out, but why bother! Cheers,

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