“how to do screen recordings with zoom and panning”
Summary of results
When it works with Zoom screen sharing
If you're on a Mac, you can just use QuickTime Player.
File -> New Screen Recording
I think it does pretty well with movement on the screen. Just remember that "stop" is Cmd-Ctrl-Esc!
Quick PSA: If you want to do a facecam-overlayed screen recording on a Mac, all you need is QuickTime.
1. QuickTime -> New Movie Recording
2. View -> Float on Top
3. Position face view where you want it to be.
4. Hit Cmd+Shift+5 to record the entire screen.
Voilà!
One trick I learnt is that you can do screen recording using PowerPoint
I want to ideally press a hotkey and have the recording zoom into the area of the screen I'm interacting with the mouse, then hotkey to zoom back out to see the full application.
If you have a mac, buy Compressor app from Apple set up Folder watch, use Zoom to start an empty video meeting to show video of yourself, minimize(shift cmd m) and float(cmd alt f) the zoom window, then use MacOS screen record(cmd shift 5) to record.
I can get this screen grab setup up running in 10 seconds. You don’t need Loom for most cases
From the linked video, I saw video panning with mouse movement and zoom-to-clicks ... I think Camtasia can do those? For sure on the zoom, less sure on the panning. Camtasia is commercial and cross-platform.
Added benefit is that I think Camtasia is relatively easy to pickup compared to other tools I've tried to use.
iirc zoom has some features like annotation that only work over a "screenshare" as it understands them, and not on other surfaces.
it's possible to go one step further with OBS, take your capture camera and open a "windowed projector" and just share that window with zoom. then you have a window with a view manipulable from within OBS but zoom understands it as a screen capture too.
zooming and panning is often easier, particularly if a website is hijacking scrolls and slowing them down, doing scroll snapping, etc.
This solves the missing mouse panning button. You can zoom-in, move mouse somewhere else, zoom-out and voilà, panning happened.
Screen sharing is much easier over zoom. Others can add annotations too.
Does anyone know tools that can capture high quality screen recordings from a browser session? Thinking about the type of video that has lots of dramatic pans and zooms + smooth cursor movement used in marketing videos. I feel like I came across a tool that could do this but can’t find it now / might have been my imagination.
On macOS, screen recording: https://imgur.com/a/HCcUPC1
Pinch zoom and two finger scrolling worked for me on Mac. Presumably mouse wheel on a mouse, perhaps combined with shift/ctrl/option/command for horizontal zooming. Holding space is often used for panning (thanks Photoshop), so give that a try too.
Like this?
Zoom in up to 1.5x and pan always at center of picture (not tested):
import ffmpeg
(
ffmpeg
.input(
'\*.jpg',
pattern_type='glob',
framerate='1/5'
)
.zoompan(
z='min(zoom+0.0015,1.5)',
d=700,
x='in_w/2-(in_w/zoom/2)',
y='in_h/2-(in_h/zoom/2)'
)
.output('output.mp4', pix_fmt='yuv420p')
.run()
)
stitching [0], [1], and [2]
[0]https://github.com/kkroening/ffmpeg-python#quickstart
[1]https://kkroening.github.io/ffmpeg-python/#ffmpeg.zoompan
[2]https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#Examples-133
EDIT: added options for slideshow style
Congrats on launching. Can you add an auto-zooming feature like https://screen.studio
Many screen recordings are now consumed on mobile, and it's difficult to see details without zooming.
I tried doing this on Windows with OBS, and got it working with a Python script but it was painful.
seems to be done in the same way, but the parameters are off. aswd (camera angle) + arrow keys(panning) works nicely when zoomed out but very sensitive when zoomed in.
Yeah just record the whole screen and zoom in on the relevant section in your video editor. If you’re not looking for anything fancy in terms of transitions, that’ll be a rather straightforward edit.
If you’re on a 1080p monitor, just due to the resolution you’d be zooming into, it may end up being easier to just switch between full screen windows and cut the transitions
Good suggestion, unfortunately that zooms the entire screen including the recording software so it's not exactly usable for the types of recordings I want to do. Ideally I want to zoom in on just part of the active window.
evince (linux) does Zoom with Ctrl + Scroll, maybe yours does too? I don't think it has Pan, but I'm keyboard-heavy and use horizontal scroll with Shift + Scroll.
What do you mean by real-time? Do you want your screen to zoom while you are recording? Or do you mean that you want the zooming to happen automatically?
Zoom lets you share a region of your screen if you click the advanced tab when sharing.
Modern-ish macOS has a built-in screen recorder. Try pressing Cmd+Shift+5
I would use OBS with some added plugin [0] to allow zooming on your cursor with a hotkey.
On Linux you can just use "SimpleScreenRecorder". It allows recording video of a single window (with audio from mic). I use it at work to create demos. My video demos are better than most others' because the video does not contain the whole screen (unlike many other demos) and my videos are accompanied by audio narration so demo can be watched independently later. Mac users often ask me how I create my demo videos.
Correct, this is it! It's basically a blend of screen recording and AE. The recording is made and then the software smoothes cursor movements and creates the zoom effects.
On Linux for screen recording I use Peek and I really like the approach
You just resize Peek‘s transparent window over the part of the screen that you want and hit record
I liked how zooming and panning in one pane was automatically refkected in the other, nice.
Thanks for the recommendations, I'll take a look at them.
For PIP I simply used Quicktime (the one that comes with Mac). I opened a "New Movie Recording", but didn't hit record. Then I resized the window and put it where I want. Finally, I open a "New Screen Recording" that captures a 1080p portion of my window. So, Quicktime is recording itself.
I also tried this with recording turned on in both windows, and it works fine. That would allow me to switch back and forth between screen and face in editing, if I wanted to.
On Mac: Quicktime + iMovie.
Quicktime has a very simple/flexible screen recorder built in. You can record a section of your screen, or full screen. If you make a mistake, pause for 5 seconds and then just do a re-take on the fly.
Import the QT recording into iMovie. Clip out of the unwanted sections and export your video.
You can’t take a screenshot is different than Zoom not being able to.
You basically can take screenshots/record your screen in every major wayland compositor. On the other hand, screen recording by applications require interfacing with pipewire, which is pretty much done by many programs (including chrome (and thus electron), firefox, obs, etc), but plenty electron apps do not use the necessary flag.
If you don’t want to tinker with rebuilds I recommend using the web version of zoom in an up-to-date browser.
and adds screen recording functionality as a video
Zathura does that under Linux, with the difference that zoom is achieved with Ctrl instead of Alt. Right-Click dragging = pan.
One feature I absolutely love is that Page Down goes to the top of the next page. It's very practical when you want to skim something quickly, with a zoom level that doesn't fit a page size perfectly.
On the web at least I am used to ctrl/cmd+scroll to zoom, shift+scroll for horizontal pan and scroll for vertical scroll.
Middle mouse drag should definitely pan.
I also built ScreenRun, a video editor with zooms and fake clicks running 100% client side with web codecs.
You can try for free https://screenrun.app/
it’s dependent in your window system. with wayland zoom is using screen shots to create a video feed in lieu of using the actual api because it would mean zoom has to respect privacy so no go
I thought you could only do screen recording via QuickTime This mirroring feature actually lets you interact with the phone
It’s so blisteringly effective to grab a portion of the screen, draw on it, copy the whole thing again and paste it to a coworker in chat or a task tool.
You can make it even faster by cutting out the Preview step. When the thumbnail of the screenshot appears in the lower-right corner of the screen, click it, and then you can use Markup to annotate the image right there, and then share it as needed.
Since I don't have your Logitech, I don't know if this method will support your hand-writing step. But it's worth a try, and is still useful for drawing circles and arrows and things on screenshots before firing them off to a coworker.
It's done in two steps, first use loom to record the mouse movement in much higher res than needed and then use resolve to zoom, follow and frame as needed.
macos makes it really easy to record the screen. cmd-shift-5 brings up the screenshot app. but converting them to gifs or other video formats is not possible, unless you use third party apps. in that case, you might as well just use a better screenshot app that does that for you.
what I wish we could record, however, is the system interactions (kinda like how you record games inside the game itself). it doesn’t record a video, but rather your mouse movements and keyboard inputs, along with the location of apps and windows and their state. it would take more space but it would be more useful in case you wanna go back and run counterfactuals.
You can also overlay your iPhone/iPad screen on your camera feed. I literally set this up just yesterday after being frustrated with trying to hold up my iPhone to show something in a zoom. I know Zoom offers a way to share your iPhone screen (like a screenshare) but it can be flakey (the airplay version is more flakey) and sometimes I don't want to throw the whole meeting into chaos by starting a screenshare.
Now I can just fire up OBS, switch my camera in Zoom to the OBS virtual webcam (which shows my main webcam), then toggle on my iPhone source and drag it anywhere I want in the frame.
This app is free. In addition to recording your windows with sound, you can hide the cursor. The app was developed as a companion app to ScreenRun https://screenrun.app/ to help you record high quality videos of any window.
Web browsers do not have the capability to get where you click when using getDisplayMedia so this native app saves the clicks in the description field of the MP4.
So when you paste or import that video into ScreenRun website, the web app reads the metadata and is able to automatically create for you the points where zooming effects should happen.
Even if you don’t use the ScreenRun website you can use this native macOS app to just record screencasts
Zoom lets you draw on screen or allow remote control which is not possible with a webapp.
Others mentioned ScreenStudio (which is awesome), but if you don't need all of its features (or can't afford it at the moment), I've found ScreenRun to be a great alternative: https://screenrun.app/
It's browser-based, but there's a Mac (and Windows I think) companion app that records the screen with click-tracking for zooming (as it's not possible with browser screen sharing just yet). It's somehow limited compared to ScreenStudio, and the interface feels cheaper compared to a native Swift app, but for my needs it gets the job done.
You can use the Zoom chat and just share your screen to use as a whiteboard. No need for audio.
TOS doesn't matter. Select discord, windows+alt+R to start screen recording, middle click and drag to start scrolling slowly, walk away from computer.
Is there any trick to record a video of a given app window only (or that covers area of a window)? Making screenshot is easy with pressing `space`, is there an equivalent for videos?
I just do it in OBS and expose the result as a virtual camera. Zoom/Slack/Meet just use the virtual camera with no additional config
Can it? File / New screen recording just gets me the same cmd+shift+5 interface.
Is there any trick to record a video of a given app window only
Quicktime Player does this.
New Screen Recording → Capture Selected Window
You can do this on Firefox if (and only if I think) you have a multi-touch input device. So on my trackpad (a Wacom tablet) or my touchscreen laptop I can pinch to pan and zoom like this. But I don't think there is a way to trigger this with a keyboard and mouse.
I don't think I prefer it most of the time, as scrolling is annoying. But it is super useful for sites that break the browser-default scrolling.