How to Screen Record on Mac

The fastest way to record your Mac screen is Shift + Command + 5. That opens the capture toolbar, where you choose the whole screen or a selected region, pick a microphone, and hit Record. Stop from the menu bar, and a .mov file lands on your Desktop.

That covers maybe 70% of what people need. The other 30% is where things get frustrating: no app sound in the file, text too small to read once the video is embedded somewhere, and a mouse cursor that's impossible to follow. Here's the full picture.

Method 1: the built-in capture toolbar (Shift + Command + 5)

Press Shift + Command + 5 and the toolbar appears at the bottom of the screen. The two rightmost capture buttons are the recording modes: entire screen, or a selected portion you drag out.

Before you press Record, open Options:

• Microphone — set this explicitly. It defaults to None, which is why so many people finish a take and discover it's silent.
• Save to — Desktop by default. Point it somewhere sane if you record often.
• Timer — a 5 or 10 second delay is useful for getting your hands and windows in position.
• Show Mouse Clicks — draws a dark circle on each click. Crude, but better than nothing.

Stop recording with the menu bar square, or Command + Control + Escape.

This method is free, instant, and reliable. It has no editing beyond trim, no webcam overlay, no zoom, and no system audio.

Method 2: QuickTime Player

QuickTime's File → New Screen Recording hands off to the same capture toolbar on current macOS versions, so the recording capability is identical. Where QuickTime still earns its place is afterwards: open the file, press Command + T, and you get a simple trim handle to cut the dead air off both ends. Then export at a reduced size if the file is too big to email.

QuickTime is also the easiest way to record a webcam-only clip — File → New Movie Recording — which is handy for a talking-head intro you'll cut in later. What it will not do is record your screen and your webcam into the same session. For a longer breakdown of where the ceiling is, see CursorFocus vs QuickTime.

Method 3: record in the browser, with nothing installed

If you're on a machine you don't control, or you just need a quick capture without a download, our free online screen recorder uses the browser's own capture API. Pick a screen or tab, record, and download the file. Nothing is uploaded — the recording is assembled locally and saved to your Downloads folder.

Browser capture is genuinely useful for bug reports and quick shares. It's not the tool for a 20-minute course lesson.

Method 4: a dedicated recorder, when the output matters

The moment a recording is going on a landing page, a course platform, or YouTube, the built-in tools start costing you time in editing instead of saving it. A dedicated app records screen, camera, microphone, and system audio in one pass and applies the presentation layer for you.

CursorFocus is built for exactly that job: it detects every click and zooms in on it automatically, smooths the cursor path, adds padding and a background behind the capture, and exports a local MP4 up to 4K. It runs on macOS 14 or later on Apple Silicon, costs $79 once, and keeps every file on your Mac.

It is the wrong tool if you want to live stream (use OBS) or you're on Windows.

The system audio problem

macOS does not route app audio into a screen recording by default. Not in the capture toolbar, not in QuickTime. If your recording needs the sound of the app you're demonstrating — a notification chime, a video playing in your UI, a game — you have two options:

1. Install a virtual audio driver (BlackHole is free, Loopback is paid) and route output into your recorder as an input.
2. Use a recorder that captures system audio as its own track. CursorFocus does this, and keeps microphone and system audio separate so you can balance them afterwards.

Decide before you record. There's no way to recover audio that was never captured.

The "text is too small" problem

This is the mistake that costs the most re-records. You record your full 16-inch display, it looks perfect on that display, and then the video gets embedded in a 700px-wide page or watched on a phone. Now nobody can read the button you're pointing at.

Two fixes, in order of effort:

• Record a region, not the whole screen. Drag a selection around just the part of the UI that matters. Free and immediate.
• Zoom during the recording. Every meaningful click should fill a significant chunk of the frame. Doing that by hand in a timeline is slow, which is why automatic click-zoom exists.

If you want to sanity-check dimensions before you start, the screen resolution calculator maps your display to a target output size.

A 60-second setup that prevents most problems

Where your recordings go, and what to do next

The built-in tools save .mov to your chosen folder — Desktop unless you changed it. .mov is fine on a Mac and fine for YouTube, but MP4 with H.264 is the safer format for the web, Slack, and email.

From there:

• Need to cut the start and end? The free video trimmer runs locally in your browser.
• Need it as an animated GIF for a README or issue thread? Use MP4 to GIF.
• Recording something longer or more polished? Lock your settings first with the best screen recording settings on Mac, then follow the workflow in how to record a product demo.

Short answer, by use case

Grabbing a bug or a quick explanation for a colleague? Shift + Command + 5, and don't overthink it. Recording a tutorial series or something that represents your product publicly? Take the extra ten minutes to set up audio and zoom properly — it's the difference between a recording people watch and one they close.