Recording your screen
Choose Video in the kind group, pick a mode, and take the shot the same way you would for a screenshot. Press the Region button a second time, press the Monitor button a second time, or click a window.
If the Video button is greyed out and its tooltip reads "Video (another capture is recording)", another recording is already running. Finish that one first.
The recording begins immediately unless you set a delay, in which case it starts when the countdown reaches zero.
Sound
Two buttons appear beside the kind group as soon as you choose Video: Microphone and System audio. System audio is your computer's own sound, the thing you would hear from the speakers. Microphone is your voice.
You can turn each on or off before you start and while you are recording. A button that is on wears a ring in your accent colour. A button that is off is dimmed.
Once a channel is armed, its button doubles as a level meter. The fill rises with the sound going into it, in green, and turns red if the level reaches the red zone. That gives you a way to check your microphone is actually picking you up before you commit to a take.
Muting is not the same as not recording. Both channels are captured the whole time, and your mute choices are applied when the recording is finished. That is why you can toggle freely mid-take without leaving a gap.
Push to talk
If you turn on push to talk in Settings, under Audio & Video, the microphone button stops being a switch and becomes an indicator. Your microphone is live only while you hold the microphone shortcut, which is Shift+Alt+M by default.
Holding it lights the button up even before you start recording, so it doubles as a quick microphone test.
Where your desktop offers a shortcut service of its own, this one is registered with it, so it works while the app you are recording has the focus. That is the point of hold to talk, and it is why the shortcut is a chord rather than a plain letter.
The controls while recording
The toolbar changes to three controls:
- Pause and resume. Shows pause bars while recording, and a play icon while paused.
- The red chip, which is stop and save. It shows a stop icon and the elapsed time. The time is recorded time, so it stops counting while you are paused, and it is the length the finished file will be.
- Cancel, which throws the recording away.
Pausing genuinely stops the recording. Nothing is captured while paused, and the result is one continuous file with no seam. Resume picks up exactly where you left off.
The microphone and system audio buttons stay on the toolbar throughout, so you can mute yourself mid-sentence and unmute later.
For a region recording the dimmed surround and the selection outline stay on screen the whole time, so what you see inside the line is exactly what is going into the file. Window and monitor recordings draw no frame and show only the controls.
Controlling it from the tray
Every recording also puts an icon in your system tray, or the menu bar on macOS. The icon itself tells you the state: corner brackets on their own means idle, brackets with a dot in the middle means recording, and brackets with pause bars means paused.
Its menu is the same everywhere:
- Toggle Microphone
- Toggle System Audio
- Pause Recording, or Resume Recording
- Finish & Save Recording
- Cancel & Delete Recording
Below that, a Capture Menu submenu holds Scanner, Capture Region, Capture Window, Capture Monitor, Settings and Quit.
When the toolbar hides itself
There is a setting called Hide toolbar on full screen captures, off by default. With it on, the toolbar disappears in the cases where it cannot get out of the recorded picture: a whole-monitor recording, a region too big to leave room beside it, or a window whose position the app was not told.
When it hides, the overlay stops taking clicks and keys entirely, and the tray menu becomes your only way to control the recording. Know where it is before you turn this on.
Keyboard
| Key | What it does |
|---|---|
| Shift+Alt+Enter | Stops the recording and saves it |
| Shift+Alt+M | Microphone on or off |
| Shift+Alt+S | System audio on or off |
| Esc | Puts the drawing tools back on Pointer. It never stops the recording |
| V | The same as Esc |
| Right click | The same as Esc |
The three chords are the same on every computer, and they are chords so they cannot fire while you are typing. They work before a recording starts too, so you can set your channels up with the keyboard and watch the buttons respond.
Esc, V and right click all do exactly the same thing, so use whichever is nearest, and none of them can stop or cancel the take. They do nothing while no drawing tool is turned on. See Live annotation for the drawing tools themselves.
If recording will not start
If the app cannot find ffmpeg, which is the tool it uses to write video files, it does not fail silently. It opens Settings on the Screen Recordings tab so you can see what is missing. On Windows and macOS the official builds include everything needed. On Linux you install ffmpeg yourself.