For some reason, when trying to export/share lengthy video recordings with Telestream’s Screenflow, I was continually running out of hard drive space on my main hard drive. I have many external hard drives with terabytes of space on them, but no matter what hard drive I specified as my scratch drive in the screenflow settings, screenflow would always use my main hard drive to export the videos.
I became so frustrated because I would record 1 to 2 hour video screencasts and then could not do anything with them because I could not get my system to allow for the amount of free space screenflow thought I needed.
Finally, I was so fed up, that I sent screenflow a message to their support team.
When trying to share my video on youtube or vimeo, I get the error “Unable to optimize MPEG-4 for network usage. Please check there is enough free space on the destination volume”.
There are other threads of people reporting the same issue I have.
http://forum.telestream.net/forum/messageview.aspx?catid=42&threadid=14256
and
http://forum.telestream.net/forum/messageview.aspx?catid=42&threadid=14466
I too am frustrated as I have cleared up 30 GB of space on my main HD, but my scratch setup has 1TB of free space. Clearly the system is not properly using the scratch I am specifying solely.
I have run into this issue throughout owning this product and have been forced to abandon some video that I could not get to render. I finally now decided to send a trouble ticket as I am tired of not being able to upload my longer videos to youtube or vimeo. Usually over 1 hr or so and I start running into trouble. I have 16 GB of Ram, but I would think this program could render outside of Ram as that will always be a limiting factor.
I had thought I had freed up enough space on my hard drive to be able to export. 30GB sounds like plenty of space for only an hour video. Even if screenflow only allows one video size recording….high!
Their response was actually along the lines of what I expected. They sent me a link to upgrade my Screenflow 4 to Screenflow 4.5.4. But I hoped this meant that had fixed the process to share videos so that my main hard drive would not come into the equation, but that wasn’t the case. It did take away the error message I had above, but my main hard drive was still being used.
After upgrading, I was able to upload the 1 hr long video, however, this still did not completely resolve my issue.
I was still noticing that when exporting my video to youtube, vimeo, or any other sharing platform, my hard drive space on my main hard drive was still getting eaten up. And not only that, after the video finished exporting, I would not regain the hard drive space that was getting allocated for sharing/exporting.
This meant that if I exported one lengthy video, my hard went from having 30GB of space to 15GB. Then if I tried to export another video I would only have 15 GB to work from, which in some cases seemed to not be enough still for the longer screencasts.
Although I can’t seem to figure out exactly how to get Screenflow to only work on my external scratch device that I specified, I was at least able to figure out where it is storing the temporary files so I could remove them after the upload was complete.
For me, the files are being stored at:
/private/var/folders/8f/T
I am using Apple’s Mountain Lion OSX which may have something to do with my issues. But that being said, I could not find anywhere else on the Internet that mentioned how to clean up the temporary files that Telestream Screenflow was producing. This folder is hidden so it may not be directly visible to click to from a finder window without showing hidden files.
Hopefully sharing this information at least helps a few people out there struggling with the same issue I was struggling with these past few weeks.
Screenflow 5 is currently out and Telestream is advertising to me constantly to upgrade. I’ve reviewed the perks of the upgrade and to me, I’m not quite ready to make the change. I’m finally now getting a working system with what I purchased.
