Screen recording on a Mac, start to finish

Start here

Shift, Command and 5 brings up a small floating toolbar. Five buttons sit along it: three concerned with screenshots, two with recording. Pick whole screen or a selected area, press Record, and you are going.

Newer releases added a third recording mode that captures one specific window. Choose it, click the window, and nothing outside that window appears in the result. It is tidier than dragging a rectangle and removes the risk of catching a sliver of whatever sits behind.

Stopping is either the button that appears in the menu bar, or Command, Control and Escape together.

QuickTime Player has a New Screen Recording entry in its File menu that opens this identical toolbar. There is one recorder in macOS with two entrances, so the choice between them changes nothing.

Open Options before you press Record

The Options button on that toolbar holds the settings that determine whether your recording is usable, and every one of them defaults to something you probably do not want.

The microphone starts switched off. Narrating an entire walkthrough and discovering afterwards that it is silent is a rite of passage worth skipping.

Show Mouse Clicks draws a dark ring at each click. Anything instructional needs this — without it a viewer sees the result of a click and has to guess where it happened.

The timer buys a few seconds before capture begins, enough to move the toolbar out of shot and arrive at a sensible first frame.

Save Location points at the Desktop. Change it if you record with any regularity, because these files pile up faster than you would think.

The audio nobody warns you about

Here is the thing that generates most of the searching. The recorder built into macOS captures your microphone. It does not capture the audio your Mac is producing — not a video playing, not a call, not a game.

This is not a bug awaiting a fix, and no hidden preference switches it on. Apple has consistently declined to make capturing system audio a one-click affair, and the reasons are not hard to guess.

The established workaround routes your audio through a virtual device such as BlackHole. Your Mac plays into that device, the recorder treats it as a microphone, and the sound arrives. Making it work while still hearing anything yourself requires assembling a Multi-Output device in Audio MIDI Setup, and that step is where most attempts end.

The less painful route is a recorder that does this natively. OBS is free and handles system audio without any of the routing, in exchange for a longer initial setup than pressing a key combination.

Newer macOS versions split the relevant permission into two: recording the screen and recording system audio are granted separately. A third-party recorder producing video with no sound has usually been given one and not the other.

Permission behaving oddly

Anything that records your display needs explicit permission under Privacy and Security in System Settings. The part that catches people is that granting it mid-session frequently does nothing until the application is quit and reopened.

Recent versions also ask again periodically for apps holding this permission. Nothing has been withdrawn — macOS is checking that you still want a program watching your screen, and answering once more is all that is required.

An application absent from the list entirely can normally be added with a plus button at the bottom of the panel.

Two properties of the output that will annoy you

The first is size. Mac displays are dense and the recorder captures every pixel of them. Five minutes can pass half a gigabyte, and a proper tutorial reaches several.

The second is format. Recordings arrive as MOV, which is entirely comfortable within the Apple world and a nuisance outside it — Windows machines, Android phones, older editors and plenty of upload forms will refuse it or play it without sound.

The format issue is usually solved in seconds, because the video can be moved into an MP4 rather than converted, with MOV to MP4.

The size issue responds well to the video compressor.

Retina captures can also be halved without anything becoming illegible, using change resolution.

Screen recordings shrink further than camera footage ever does, because most of the frame is perfectly still from one moment to the next, and stillness is nearly free to compress.

Matching the output to where it is going

A bug report or a support ticket usually wants something that plays without anyone clicking anything, and a video file often will not.

For a handful of seconds, a GIF autoplays essentially everywhere — make one with video to GIF.

A walkthrough headed for documentation or a video platform should stay an MP4, but it should be shorter than what came out of the recorder. Nobody needs the opening half minute where you were locating the correct window.

Remove it with the video trimmer.

Where the built-in tool runs out

No system audio, no webcam inset, no scenes, no pause, and no control over frame rate or quality. Those are real ceilings rather than quibbles.

OBS clears all of them and costs you a configuration session instead of a keystroke. For something you will do weekly that is a good trade; for one clip this afternoon it is not.

Common questions