I use Screenflow 6 (as of this writing) to edit and produce videos. Some of those videos are quite long, and so I use the markers feature of Screenflow in order to allow viewers to skip ahead to various important points in the video, known as chapter markers or chapters. I provide notes along side these long videos to help the viewer find relevant information inside them, and I like to include in those notes an index of the video, which I produce from the chapter markers using a tool for Mac OS called Subler. Sadly, in order to export the chapter markers from Screenflow, I have to do two things:

  1. Export the video.
  2. Remember to check the damn checkbox for “include chapter markers”.

Exporting the video can take a long time. Recently, I waited about an hour to export a 2-hour-long video. I don’t object to how long it takes to export video, but I mind that I have to export the entire video in order to export the chapter markers. There has to be a better way.

I found one. I export the video without the video.

When I export the video from Screenflow, I export it in .mp4 format, but I exclude the video track from the video, exporting only the audio. I tried exporting nothing, but this seemed to cause Screenflow to do nothing and I needed to kill Screenflow and restart it. (I can hear the meeting now: “No-one’s ever going to have a legitimate reason to export a video with neither the video track nor the audio track!”) When I tried again, I exported in .mp4 format, and then pressed Customize..., which allowed me to select only the audio track. This time, exporting the 2-hour-long video took only about 3 minutes. Much better.

So this becomes my workflow:

  1. Edit the video, setting chapter markers throughout.
  2. Group the entire video into a single, large Nested Clip.
  3. Add the intro and outro as Nested Clips, so that I have the marker times right.
  4. Add a marker for the first frame of the video, as suggested by http://telestream.force.com/kb/articles/Knowledge_Article/Chapter-Markers.
  5. Export the video in .mp4 format, exporting only the audio track.
  6. Open the exported “video” in Subler.
  7. From Subler, export the chapter markers as a text file.
  8. Process the text file to turn the output format into something a human can read.

Enjoy.

Of course, since there exists a workaround, Telestream will never implement the feature to export only the chapter markers from a video, even though it means that you will almost certainly waste some non-trivial amount of time before discovering this article and learning what to do. Shame.