Screencasting on OSX

I record with Cap and edit in CapCut. One press of Record captures my screen and my facecam as two separate files, already in sync, so I can still cut, resize and background-remove the facecam on its own. I landed here after Loom kept stalling on capture (while costing $20/month), one-take OBS recordings ate my time, and juggling two recorders got old. Here’s the setup, plus the tips I picked up along the way.

Recording: Cap

Cap is an open source (GitHub) Loom alternative:

brew install --cask cap

The key is Studio Mode. Each take writes the screen and the webcam as separate files, display.mp4 and camera.mp4. They live inside the .cap package: right-click it, Show Package Contents, then content/segments/.... Drop both into CapCut as two tracks.

  • Use Studio Mode, not Instant Mode. Instant Mode bakes the camera into the screen video.
  • Cap’s editor has no camera-only export yet, so grab the raw files from the package.

  • For a live preview of my face while recording, I position Hand Mirror out of the way:

    osascript -e 'tell application "Hand Mirror" to set bounds of window 1 to {1600, 50, 1850, 300}'

Microphone cleanup

TBD if I need this.

Hosting - YouTube!

Video trimming

CapCut is my recommended choice for video editing:

  • Free and powerful video editor
  • Easy trimming and multi-take management
  • Built-in background removal for facecam, positioned and resized as its own track
  • Text-to-speech and auto-captions
  • Cross-platform (web, desktop, mobile)
  • Export directly to YouTube

Captions and Chapters

ChatGPT prompts

Mouse Key Press Overlay

CUT: Previous approaches

Two recorders: Cmd+Shift+5 plus a separate facecam

I used to record the screen with the built-in macOS recorder (Cmd+Shift+5) and the facecam separately with QuickTime or ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -f avfoundation -framerate 30 -i "0:0" -c:v h264 -c:a aac facecam_$(date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S).mp4

Separate tracks were the right idea, but two recorders meant two starts, two stops and syncing in CapCut. Cap gives me both streams from one Record press, already in sync.

OBS Source Record plugin

The Source Record plugin can write each OBS source to its own file. I considered it, but forum users report it hanging on stop and garbling screen files on Apple Silicon, and it keeps all the OBS setup pain.

QuickRecorder

QuickRecorder:

  • Initially promising in 2024
  • Multi-window capture and latest APIs
  • Includes Microphone
  • Cut due to preferring separate recording tracks for more flexibility

FFMPEG

  1. Too low level

OBS

While OBS itself can be challenging, here’s a better approach:

  1. Use OBS only for screen recording, not the full production
  2. Record your camera/facecam separately
    • Gives you more control
    • Enables easy reshoots of just the video portion
    • Can apply background removal/transparency in post-production
  3. Pro Tips:
    • Say “Take 1”, “Take 2” etc. at the start of each recording
    • This makes it easier to find good takes during editing
    • Look at the audio waveform to find natural cut points if not using transcript-based editing
  4. Why the original approach failed:
    • Too painful to set up capture and screen size
    • Trying to get everything perfect in one take is inefficient

Loom

While Loom seemed promising, I ultimately cut it from my workflow:

  1. Great features in theory:
    • Video edit via text transcript (remove ah/ums)
    • Window/Application capture
    • Mouse Capture
  2. Deal-breaking issues:
    • Screen capture performance issues (slow, stopping fails)
    • Happens on multiple computers
    • Expensive ($20/month)
    • Better to use dedicated tools for each function