When I was making a screen capture with Quicktime this morning, all of the videos kept coming up with a green screen. No information. The data rate was really low. For a minute of video, there was only 1 MB of information instead of 100MB. Not a good sign. When I played back the video, there was nothing but a solid green screen.
I’m a motivational speaker, the second only American to ski alone to the South Pole. I was working on a motivational speaking video and this problem was killing my production schedule.
To fix this problem, I had to use the Macintosh Repair Disk Permissions utility. This is the one failing I’ve found with Macs – the disk permissions problem. Why this happens, I’m not sure. But it does.
Repair the problem
To fix it, power down the Mac, then restart it while holding Command-R. Once the computer completely boots up to the install screen, click the continue in English button, then select the Disk Utility tool. Near the bottom of the window, there will be a button to Repair Disk Permissions. Click that button and wait. There will be a stream of stuff flying by and then in the end, the computer will report disk permissions repaired. Quit the disk utility, then select restart machine.
The Quicktime screen record utility will start and the video screen capture should start working again.
The video screen capture utility through Quicktime in Mountain Lion is invaluable for making videos demonstrating things or capturing something else going on, say a Google Earth animation, to replay in a bigger video. This is what I have been doing for my film.
There is no particular reason to purchase another screen capture program, as Quicktime already has one built in. There are so many nice, built in tools in Mountain Lion, I’m still blown away compared to my PC.