macOS ships with a screen recorder. It is good enough for a bug report and usually not good enough for a tutorial, and knowing which one you need saves you from either a missing feature or an unnecessary purchase.

The Built-In Recorder

Press Command-Shift-5 to open the capture toolbar. It offers three recording modes — entire screen, selected portion, selected window — plus options for where the file goes, a countdown, and whether the mouse pointer is recorded.

The toolbar is the same one used for screenshots, which means the screenshot options and the recording options are in the same place. That is convenient and also the source of the most common mistake: people look for a separate recording app that does not exist.

Command-Shift-6 captures the Touch Bar on machines that have one, and Command-Shift-4 then Space records a single window.

What the Built-In Recorder Does Not Do

  • No editing — the recording is the file, and trimming means opening it in something else
  • No annotations, callouts or zoom
  • Limited control over audio sources
  • No scene composition, so a camera overlay has to be added afterwards

If any of those matter, the built-in tool is the wrong tool and no amount of configuration will fix it.

Dedicated Recorders

Kap is the open-source option: it records a region or a window and exports directly to GIF, MP4 or WebM, which is the shortest path from recording to something you can paste into a chat. It is built for short clips rather than long sessions.

ScreenFlow is the production option: recording plus a timeline, so callouts, zooms, a camera track and audio cleanup all happen in the same app. It is the right choice when the recording is the deliverable rather than an attachment.

For still images with annotation — arrows, blur, pixel dimensions — that is a screenshot tool’s job, and Shottr covers scrolling capture and OCR as well. Our guide to Mac screenshot tools compares that category.

Recording Settings That Matter

Resolution. Record at the display’s native resolution. Recording a scaled resolution and upscaling later costs quality twice.

Frame rate. 30 fps is enough for anything with text on screen. 60 fps doubles the size for motion that a tutorial rarely has.

Audio. Decide before you start whether you need system audio, microphone, or both. Mixing them after the fact is possible but tedious, and a recording with no audio at all is usually a re-record.

Storage. A ten-minute 1080p recording at a generous bitrate can run to hundreds of megabytes. Check free space first — a recording that stops because the disk filled is not recoverable.

After Recording

Trimming and compressing are the two follow-up jobs. A lossless trimmer cuts without re-encoding, which takes seconds; anything that re-encodes takes minutes and costs quality. Our guide to Mac video editors covers both ends of that range.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can the built-in macOS recorder capture system audio?

It can capture microphone input, and on recent macOS versions it can also capture system audio in some apps. Where it cannot, a dedicated recorder or a virtual audio device is the usual workaround. Test before recording anything you cannot repeat.

Why is my screen recording file so large?

Screen recordings are usually encoded at a high bitrate by default, and a static desktop still costs bandwidth in most codecs. Recording at a lower frame rate and at the display's actual resolution rather than a scaled one are the two changes that reduce size most.