Focal: guides, comparisons and notes

Focal 1.0: screen recordings that look edited, without editing

support@focalcapture.com (Vince) — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Focal, a screen recorder for Windows, is out today as version 1.0.0, its first public release. It is for people who record their screen to show something: a product demo, a bug, a tutorial, a new feature for a changelog. You press one key, record, stop, and the editor opens with the zooms already made and the cursor already smooth. All of it happens on your computer. The trial is free, has no time limit and needs no account.

My name is Vince. I build Focal by myself, in Miami. For years before that I made screen recordings by myself, and they were not good. Focal is what I eventually did about it.

Why I made it

I knew what good looked like. Screen Studio made a kind of screen recording popular on the Mac: smooth zooms on what you click, a cursor that glides instead of jittering, the recording on a clean background with rounded corners. It looks edited, and nobody had to edit it. I work on Windows. I wanted that kind of recording there, and I could not find a recorder that made it the way I wanted. So I built one, which is the sort of answer to a shopping problem only a developer would call reasonable. If that is why you are here too, I wrote about what to use for Screen Studio on Windows.

The other half was where the recording goes. What I record is often not public: work in progress, a client's dashboard, a terminal with my name in a path. I wanted the recording, the edit and the captions to be made on my own computer and to stay there, with no account to sign in to and nothing uploaded just so a feature works.

And I did not want to edit. I wanted the version the editor opens with to be good enough to export, and every change after that to be a small one. A two minute demo should not cost an hour on a timeline.

What a recording is like

Focal sits in the system tray. Press Print Screen. If another program already owns that key, such as OneDrive or ShareX, Focal uses Ctrl+PrtSc and tells you, and you can rebind it in Settings. Drag a region, click a window to snap to it, or press Enter for the whole screen. A small panel sets the microphone, system audio, camera and keystrokes before each recording. Your choices are kept for next time, except Everything for keystrokes. A countdown runs, then a small control bar shows the time, with pause and stop. Ctrl+Alt+M marks a moment, and markers become chapters.

What gets recorded is clean: the screen, without the cursor. The cursor and your keys are written down separately, as data, and that turns out to matter more than anything else in this post. More on it below.

When you stop, the editor opens with zooms already there. Clicks and bursts of typing become zooms, with a camera that eases in and out like a spring. Zooms close together join into one that pans, and the camera waits for each click instead of drifting toward the next one. The raw mouse path, hesitations and all, becomes a steady glide with a ripple on each click, and the cursor is drawn sharp at any zoom. If a zoom is wrong, drag it, delete it, or press Z to add your own. Edits save as you work.

Captions are made on your computer by a speech model that runs there. It is about 190 MB, downloaded the first time you make captions. It reads the words on screen as hints, so a name or a term like useEffect comes out spelled right instead of as the nearest English word. It works in 26 languages. In the captions list you can select words and cut them from the video, or cut every "um" and "uh" in one click.

The camera, if you switch it on before recording, sits in a corner as a circle, a rounded square or a rectangle, in sync with your voice, and you can drag it anywhere in the preview. Keystrokes are off by default. Set them to Shortcuts and key combinations like Ctrl+C show as a pill at the bottom or top of the video.

Styles hold the look: background, padding, corners, shadow, cursor, zoom feel, camera bubble and captions, saved by name and given to any recording in one step. There are twelve ready-made backgrounds, and an optional macOS or Windows title bar frames the recording like an app window.

Then you export. MP4 up to 4K at 60 fps, or a GIF, in 16:9, 9:16, 1:1, 4:5, 21:9 or the source's own shape, with zooms and captions re-aimed for each. There are presets for YouTube, Shorts and Reels, and Instagram posts. The home page goes through each feature.

The idea underneath: the cursor is data

Most recorders bake the cursor into the pixels. Once it is in the picture, it stays exactly as it was recorded, shaky path and all, like a thumb in the corner of a holiday photo.

Focal records the screen without the cursor and logs the cursor's position, clicks and shape a thousand times a second, on the same clock as the video, along with the timing of every key. The editor draws the cursor back in from that log. That one decision is why zooms can be made from your clicks after the fact, why the cursor can glide, change size or fade when idle, and why the camera, the captions and the frame can all change after you stop. I wrote the longer version in why Focal records your screen without the cursor.

The numbers

Recording goes straight into your GPU's video encoder (NVIDIA, AMD or Intel) and falls back to the CPU when there is none. Every frame is on disk the moment it is written, so a crash or a power cut keeps what you had. Measured on 2026-10-31 on an RTX 3090 with a Ryzen 9 9950X3D:

An hour at 4K 60 fps with everything on used 4.8% of the CPU. 216,032 frames, none dropped, memory flat at 130 MB.
Ten minutes of speech was captioned in about 14 seconds on the GPU, and 38 seconds on the CPU.
A 4K recording exported to 1080p ran 8 times faster than real time.

The installer is 9 MB and installs in about a second, per user, with no administrator prompt, no drivers and no services. Other machines will differ from mine, and in fairness, mine is not a modest one.

What it costs

Focal costs $99 once. At launch, the code LAUNCH typed at checkout takes it to $79, once per customer. A license covers one person on up to 3 computers and every update published in the following 12 months. After that, the version you have keeps working, with no reminder and no lock, and an optional $49 renewal adds another year of updates. Commercial use is included, and refunds are given within 14 days, no questions asked. The details are on the pricing page.

The trial is free and has no time limit: recording and editing work with every feature, with no card and no account. Exporting is what the license is for. Until you enter a key, nothing can be exported and the editor's preview shows a "Made with Focal" watermark, and a key turns exporting on and takes the watermark off.

There is no subscription, no account and no telemetry. Four things go online and nothing else: the license check once you enter a key, the daily update check (which you can turn off in Settings), the speech model download the first time you make captions, and a Microsoft component the installer fetches if Windows does not have it. The privacy note lists each one. What you record, and how many takes it took, stays between you and your disk.

What it does not do

It is Windows only: Windows 10 version 21H2 or later and Windows 11, 64-bit. There is no Mac, Linux, phone or web version.
The installer is not code-signed yet. The certificate is in progress, so for now Edge and Windows SmartScreen warn about the download, which is a reasonable thing to say about an unsigned file from someone Windows has never heard of. In Edge, open "..." next to the download, then Keep, Show more, Keep anyway. On "Windows protected your PC", click More info, then Run anyway. The installer is also published on GitHub.
There is no cloud: no share links, no viewer analytics, no team workspace, no live streaming. A recording is a folder on your disk, and you share the exported file the way you share any file.

If one of these is the reason Focal does not work for you, I would like to know.

Thanks, and where to write

Thank you for trying it. Focal is one person's work, and that person also answers the support email, so when you write, you get me. Send a bug, a recording that came out wrong, or the thing that would make Focal work for you to support@focalcapture.com. I have seen a great many recordings come out wrong, and most of them were mine. I usually reply within a day.

Screen Studio for Windows: what to use instead

support@focalcapture.com (Vince) — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Screen Studio does not run on Windows. It is a Mac app, and its makers say no Windows version is on the way. If you are on a PC and want the videos it is known for, with zooms that follow your clicks and a cursor that glides instead of twitching, the app I would point you to is the one I built: Focal, a screen recorder for Windows.

My name is Vince, and I am the one developer behind Focal, so reading this is a bit like asking a barber whether you need a haircut. I have tried to be an honest barber. Screen Studio is ahead in several places, and there is a whole section further down that says exactly where.

Is Screen Studio coming to Windows?

Not as far as its own site says. The FAQ on screen.studio answers the Windows question with a no and says there are "no near-future plans to add Windows support". For a software company, that is refreshingly direct. The app asks for macOS, with Ventura 13.1 or later recommended, and the download page offers builds for Apple silicon and Intel Macs only. If your work happens on Windows, you need a different app.

What people want from Screen Studio

Screen Studio made a particular look popular: a screen recording that looks as if an afternoon of editing went into it, when hardly any did. When people search for it on Windows, they usually mean this:

The video zooms in on what you click and eases back out, so a viewer on a phone can read a wide desktop.
The cursor moves in a steady glide rather than the shaky path a hand makes, with a ripple on each click, and stays sharp when the frame is zoomed in.
The recording sits on a background with padding, rounded corners and a shadow, so it looks like a product shot rather than a raw screen grab.
A camera bubble, captions from your voice, and shapes for YouTube, Shorts and a square post, all from one take.
Very little editing. You stop recording and most of the work is already done.

The idea that makes most of this possible is that the cursor is not burned into the picture. Screen Studio's FAQ explains that it records the screen without the cursor, logs the mouse movement as data, and draws the cursor back into the final video. That is how a cursor can be smoothed, resized and restyled after you have stopped recording. I wrote about why I took the same route in why Focal records your screen without the cursor.

What Focal does the same way

Focal works from the same idea. The screen is recorded without the cursor in it, and the cursor's position, clicks and shape are logged a thousand times a second on the same clock as the video, along with the timing of your keys. When you stop, the editor opens with the zooms already made.

Zooms made from your clicks

Clicks and bursts of typing become zooms with a camera that eases in and out like a spring. Zooms close together join into one that pans, and the camera waits for each click instead of drifting toward the next one. A camera that drifts ahead is a tour guide walking off to the next painting while you are still looking at this one. You choose what starts a zoom: clicks, right clicks, other buttons, typing, shortcuts or scrolling. You can add zooms by hand too, move the focus or change the level with keyframes, let a zoom follow the cursor, and set the speed to Slow, Smooth or Snappy. Motion blur on zooms, pans and fast cursor moves is on by default. The guide to zoom effects covers all of it with Focal as the example.

A cursor redrawn smooth and sharp

Raw mouse paths become a steady glide with a ripple on each click: a ring, a dot or a pulse, with an optional click sound. Nobody's hand is that steady, and now nobody has to know. The standard cursors are drawn as vectors, light or dark, so the cursor stays sharp at any zoom. You can also use the captured cursor or your own image, pick a size from small to large, add a halo or a spotlight that follows it, and let it fade when it sits still.

Backgrounds, camera, captions and shapes

The rest of the look comes along too:

Backgrounds: twelve ready-made ones, gradients of up to five colors, an image blurred or whole, or the recording itself blurred behind it, with padding, corners and a shadow. An optional macOS or Windows title bar frames the recording like an app window.
Camera: a circle, a rounded square, or a wide or tall rectangle, any size, dragged anywhere in the preview, in sync with your voice.
Captions: made by a speech model that runs on your computer, in 26 languages, with six looks or your own font and colors. You can cut words by selecting them in the transcript, remove every "um" and "uh" in one click, and tighten long pauses.
Keystrokes: key combinations such as Ctrl+C shown as a pill at the bottom or top of the video.
Shapes: 16:9, 9:16, 1:1, 4:5, 21:9 and the source's own, with zooms and captions re-aimed for each.
Styles: the whole look saved by name and given to any recording in one step, so your tenth video matches your first.
Export: MP4 up to 4K at 60 fps, or a GIF, with presets for YouTube, Shorts and Reels.

What Focal does differently

It runs on Windows and nothing else

Focal is for Windows 10 (version 21H2 or later) and Windows 11, 64-bit. There is no Mac version. If you use both kinds of computer, know that Focal will not follow you to a Mac, just as Screen Studio will not follow you to a PC. It is a fair arrangement, if not a convenient one.

No cloud and no account

Screen Studio takes privacy seriously as well. Its site says recordings and projects stay on your Mac, captions are transcribed there, and its cloud features are optional and ask before anything is uploaded. It can collect basic usage data, which you can turn off. Focal has no cloud at all: no account, no sign-in, no telemetry and no crash reporting. I find out how Focal is doing the old-fashioned way, when somebody tells me. Recordings, edits and captions are made and kept on your computer, in Videos\Focal or a folder you pick. Four things go out, and the privacy note lists them: the license check once you enter a key, the daily update check, the speech model download the first time you make captions, and a Windows component the installer fetches if your PC lacks it.

One price instead of a subscription

Screen Studio is sold as a subscription, $9 a month on the yearly plan or $29 a month on the monthly one, with every feature in both. Its FAQ says one-time licenses are no longer sold to new buyers. Focal is $99 once, or $79 at launch with the code LAUNCH, for one person on up to 3 computers, with every update published in the following 12 months. After that the version you have keeps working with no reminder and no lock, and an optional $49 renewal adds another year of updates. There is no subscription and there will not be one. Both apps give students and teachers 40% off. The pricing page has the rest.

The trials work the same way

This one is not a difference, but it belongs next to the price. Screen Studio's download page says that without an active plan you can use every feature except exporting video files. Focal's trial holds back the same thing. It is free with no time limit, recording and editing work with every feature, and it needs no card or account, but nothing can be exported until you enter a license key. Until then the editor's preview shows a "Made with Focal" watermark, and a key turns exporting on and takes the watermark off.

What Screen Studio has that Focal does not

Screen Studio is older and more polished, and it does more. Focal 1.0 came out on 2026-11-02, so it has some catching up to do. These are on Screen Studio's site today and not in Focal:

Recording an iPhone or iPad over a USB cable, framed in a mockup that matches the device. Focal records a Windows screen and nothing else.
Shareable links that play in a browser at 1080p and 60 fps for videos up to 30 minutes, with comments on the exact second, view counts and private links. Focal has no share links. You export a file and send it the way you send any file.
Camera layouts within one recording: fullscreen camera, split screen, camera overlay, screen only, and a cutout that removes the background behind you. It can also hide the camera while you are silent and keep your face centered. Focal places the screen and the camera where you like, and can move them with keyframes, but has no background cutout and does not hide the camera while you are silent.
A second kind of zoom, the loupe zoom, and an upscaler that keeps close zooms sharp.
AI voiceover from a typed script, speaker notes while you record, a Reel mode that shows where Instagram's or TikTok's interface will sit over your video, importing any video to edit like a recording, and copying a finished video to the clipboard.
Small cursor touches, such as gliding the cursor back to where it started so a short clip loops cleanly.

If one of those is the reason you want Screen Studio and you have a Mac, use Screen Studio. It is a very good app, and the look Focal goes for owes it a lot. That is a strange sentence to put on my own website, and it is also true.

Screen Studio and Focal side by side

Screen Studio facts checked on 2026-11-02 on its own site. Focal facts are for the current version.

Feature	Screen Studio	Focal
Platform	macOS, 13.1 or later recommended	Windows 10 (21H2 or later) and Windows 11, 64-bit
Price model	Subscription, $9 a month yearly or $29 monthly	$99 once, 12 months of updates, optional $49 renewal
Auto zoom	Yes, from what you did while recording, such as clicks	Yes, from clicks, typing, shortcuts or scrolling, your choice
Cursor	Recorded as data, smoothed and restyled after recording	Recorded as data, smoothed and redrawn as sharp vectors
Captions	From speech, transcribed on the Mac, cloud transcription optional	From speech, made on your computer, 26 languages
Where recordings live	On your Mac, with share links and shared projects uploaded when you choose	On your computer, no cloud
Trial	Every feature without a plan, except exporting video	Every feature with no time limit, except exporting

Which should you pick?

It mostly comes down to the computer on your desk, and then to how your videos travel once they are made:

You work on Windows and want the Screen Studio look: try Focal. That is the case I built it for.
You work on a Mac: use Screen Studio. It is the more complete app, especially if you want iPhone recording, a camera with its background cut out, or share links.
You work on both: neither app covers both. Screen Studio on the Mac and Focal on the PC make the same kind of video on each.
Your team needs links, comments and view counts: Screen Studio on a Mac, or a cloud recorder. Focal does not do that part.
You want to see other Windows options: FocuSee runs on Windows and Mac and also zooms automatically, and Cursorful comes as a browser extension and as desktop apps. I compared Focal with both.

The trial needs no card and has no time limit, so the quickest way to decide is to download Focal and record the demo you were going to make anyway. At worst, you end up with a finished demo sitting in the editor, one license key short of being a file.

How to record a product demo video on Windows

support@focalcapture.com (Vince) — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMT

To record a product demo video on Windows, pick the one job the video shows, write what you will say as full sentences, clean up the screen, and record it in one take with a marker at each section. Then cut the mistakes, add zooms so every click is readable, add captions, and export in the shape the place you post it wants. Most of that works with any recorder. The worked example here is Focal, a screen recorder for Windows, which does the zooms, captions and chapters for you after you stop.

My name is Vince, and I make Focal. The first audience for every demo I record is me, watching it back at my desk, and I am a tough room. Here is what that room has taught me.

Plan one job per video

A demo works when it shows one job from start to finish: invite a teammate, connect a payment provider, send the first invoice. Pick the job a new user tries first, or the feature you are announcing, and leave the rest for another video. I know the pull to show everything. It is your product, and all of it was hard to build. A tour of every screen still only proves that your product has screens, which nobody doubted. One finished job tells the viewer what it is for.

Then write one line: who is watching, and what they should do when it ends. That line decides what stays and what goes.

How long a feature demo should be

For one feature, 60 to 90 seconds is enough. People speak at roughly 150 words a minute, so that is a script of 150 to 225 words. A whole product can take three to five minutes. Past that, split it into chapters or several short videos. Nobody has ever reached the end of a demo wishing for a sixth minute.

Write a script of sentences, not bullet points

Bullet points make you improvise, and improvising is where "so, um, what I'm going to do here is" comes from. I have said that exact sentence, on camera, about software I wrote myself. Write the sentences you will say, one per action, in the order you click. Then read them aloud with the product open and rewrite any you trip on.

Say what happens, not what the control is called: "Pick a date range, and the chart redraws" beats "This is the date range selector." Open with the problem or the result, show the steps, and end on what the viewer now has. Skip "Hi, in this video I'll show you". The title already said it.

Prepare the screen before you record

I go through this list before every take, because the one notification I forget to silence always arrives during the good one.

Turn notifications off. On Windows 11, switch on Do not disturb in Settings > System > Notifications. On Windows 10 it is called Focus assist. Close chat and mail apps too.
Clean the desktop and the browser. Hide the desktop icons, close the tabs you do not need, and use a browser profile with no bookmarks bar, no extension icons and no saved form entries. Autocomplete is how a personal email address ends up in a launch video.
Make the text larger. Zoom the browser to 125% or 150%, or raise your app's font size. Text that is comfortable on a 27-inch monitor is hard to read on a phone.
Use test data that is not embarrassing. Believable names, sensible numbers and a few weeks of history look like a product people use. "asdf" and a real customer's name do not.
Size the window sensibly. About 1600 x 900 to 1920 x 1080 has the shape of a 16:9 video and keeps the interface readable. A maximized browser on a 4K monitor makes everything tiny.
Get to the starting screen. Sign in and load each page once so nothing is slow during the take.
Check the microphone. Record a sentence and listen back.

Record it with Focal

Record the whole demo in one go, section after section, with a marker at the start of each. Later you can jump straight to any part instead of scrubbing back and forth like a safecracker.

Press Print Screen. If another program owns that key, Focal uses Ctrl+PrtSc and tells you so. You can rebind it in Settings.
Click your app's window and the recording snaps to it. A window recording can leave out the app's own title bar, and in Chrome, Edge and other Chromium browsers everything but the page, which suits a web app. Focal remembers the choice per app. On Windows 10, Windows draws a yellow border around a recorded window that only Windows 11 can hide.
Choose the audio. Turn on the microphone, and system audio only if your product makes a sound worth hearing. On Windows 11, system audio can record only one app or leave one out, so a chat ping stays out of the demo. Focal keeps these choices for next time. There is more in the guide to recording system audio and your microphone.
Turn on the camera before you start, if it helps. A live bubble shows you the camera and never appears in the recording.
If the demo uses keyboard shortcuts, set keystrokes to Shortcuts, and combinations like Ctrl+K show as a pill on the video. Avoid Everything if you will type a password: the input log then keeps all typing, and Focal warns before such a project is exported or shared.
After the countdown, a small control bar shows the time, with pause and stop. Press Ctrl+Alt+M at the start of each section. Every marker becomes a chapter.
Press stop at the end of the script.

When you fumble a line

You will. Everyone does, and the people whose demos look effortless are mostly good at cutting. If you lose your place, click pause on the control bar, find your spot in the script and resume. It stays one recording, and clicks on the bar never cause a zoom. If you trip over a word, keep going: stop, wait a second, and say the whole sentence again. The silence and the repeat are easy to spot in the transcript and quick to cut. Start over only when the product itself goes wrong in a way you cannot cut around.

Edit the recording

When you stop, the editor opens with zooms already made from your clicks and bursts of typing. The camera eases in and out like a spring, waits for each click rather than drifting to the next, and joins nearby zooms into one that pans. Edits save as you work. This is the order I go in, which I settled on after trying most of the others.

Make captions first, because they are also your transcript. Focal makes them on your computer with a speech model that runs there (about 190 MB, downloaded the first time), and it reads the words on screen as hints, so your product's name comes out right. Correct any line that is still wrong. The guide to adding captions to a screen recording covers the looks and the timing.

Then cut by the transcript. Select the words of a fumbled sentence in the captions list and cut them from the video. Cut every "um" and "uh" in one click, then tighten long pauses. Pauses where you click or type are kept.

Trim the start and end on the timeline, and split out what the transcript cannot reach, like a page that took five seconds to load. If the viewer needs to see it happen, speed the clip up instead. Your voice keeps its normal pitch.

Now check the zooms. Delete any that land on nothing. Drag on the zoom lane or press Z to add one, and press K to add a keyframe that moves the focus or changes the level. Speed is Slow, Smooth or Snappy, for all zooms or one, and zooms you edited stay as you left them if you change the automatic settings later. The guide to zoom effects in a screen recording goes deeper, and the zoom section of the home page sums it up.

Place the camera once you know where the action is: a corner the demo does not use, at any size, as a circle, a rounded square, or a wide or tall rectangle, with an optional border and shadow.

Last, turn on voice cleanup in the Audio tab. It removes background noise and evens out loudness to the level web video is mixed at. Background music added under the recording gets quieter while you talk.

Make it look like your product

Raw screen footage looks like a screen, which is accurate in the way a passport photo is accurate. A background, padding and a soft shadow make it look like a product shot, and a style saves all of it so every demo matches the last.

A style in Focal stores the background, padding, corners, shadow, cursor, zoom feel, camera bubble, captions and more under a name. Give it to any recording in one step, make it the default for new ones, or export it as a file with its images inside. The background can be one of twelve ready-made ones, a gradient of up to five of your brand colors, an image blurred or whole, or the recording itself blurred.

An optional macOS or Windows title bar frames the recording like an app window, which suits a page recorded without its browser. Your logo can sit in a corner of every frame. Intro and end title cards name the video and give a next step, such as your web address, and chapter titles can appear on screen. The styles section has the full list.

Export and post it

Focal exports MP4 in H.264 or HEVC at Original, 1080p or 4K, up to 60 fps, or a GIF. H.264 plays everywhere, which makes it the dull, correct choice: pick it unless you know HEVC is accepted where you post. Presets cover YouTube at 1920 x 1080, Shorts and Reels, Instagram posts, HEVC and GIFs, plus your own. The export section has the details.

For YouTube, use the YouTube preset. Your markers come out as chapters in the file, and a click copies them as YouTube timestamps for the description. YouTube shows chapters when the list starts at 0:00 and has at least three entries, so check the first line before you publish.

Captions can go out as a track viewers switch on, drawn into the picture, or both, and on YouTube you can upload a saved .srt with the video. Drawn captions suit social feeds, where many people watch with the sound off.

For Shorts, Reels or TikTok, change the aspect ratio to 9:16 and Focal re-aims the zooms and captions. Use Save a copy first, so the 16:9 version stays, then export the copy with the Shorts and Reels preset. The guide to turning a screen recording into a vertical video has more, and 1:1 and 4:5 work the same way.

Focal makes a file and stops there: no share link, no hosting. The video goes wherever you post it. Exporting that file needs a license. Recording and editing are free, with every feature, no time limit and no card or account, so you can download Focal, make your demo and watch it in the preview before you buy. Until you enter a key, the preview shows a "Made with Focal" watermark.

Focal vs Camtasia: a recorder that edits itself, or a full editor

support@focalcapture.com (Vince) — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMT

If you are looking for a Camtasia alternative on Windows, the real question is what shape of tool you want. Camtasia is a screen recorder attached to a full video editor: you record, then you build the video on a timeline with tracks, callouts, transitions and quizzes. Focal, a screen recorder for Windows, works the other way round: when you stop recording, the editor opens with zooms already placed from your clicks, the cursor smoothed and your saved frame applied, and it is there to adjust rather than to build. For a course with quizzes, heavy annotation or many sources cut together, Camtasia is the tool. For a demo that should look good in a few minutes, I built Focal.

My name is Vince, and I make Focal, so this is a chef reviewing his own restaurant and the one across the street. I have tried to be fair about the menu over there, which is a long one. Every fact about Camtasia below comes from TechSmith's own site, and where Camtasia is the better tool, I say so plainly. The other differences fit in three sentences. Camtasia runs on Windows and Mac, Focal only on Windows. Camtasia is sold as a yearly subscription, Focal costs $99 once. Both make captions on your computer.

What Camtasia is

Camtasia is TechSmith's screen recorder and video editor, and for a long time it was the default answer to "how do I make a tutorial video". It runs on Windows 10 and 11 and on macOS 14 or later. The recorder captures screen, camera, system audio and microphone as separate layers, and the editor is a timeline you stack media on in tracks.

Around that timeline sit callouts, arrows, shapes, titles, templates, transitions, cursor effects and a zoom and pan tool. The Essentials plan adds quizzes and SCORM export, which is how a video becomes a lesson in a learning platform. Higher plans add generated voiceovers (Create) and avatars, translation and dubbing (Pro).

Camtasia also has Rev, TechSmith's answer to the same wish Focal answers. I would love to tell you I was the only person who wanted a recording to come out already looking finished. I was not. Turned on in the recorder, Rev opens when you stop and offers ready-made layouts, backgrounds, effects, automatic zooms and captions. To go further you unpack the Rev media into separate tracks, and TechSmith's tutorial says that once unpacked it cannot go back to Rev to change the look.

Record then build, or record then adjust

In Camtasia the editor is the center of the work. A recording lands on the timeline as a clip, next to whatever else you bring in: other recordings, camera footage, images, music. You make the video by adding to it, a callout here, a transition there, a zoom on the part that matters. Everything a training video could need is within reach, and the price is time and decisions. I have opened a full editor to make a "quick" two-minute video and looked up to find it was dark outside. More than once.

In Focal the recording is the video. You press Print Screen, drag a region, click a window or press Enter for the whole screen, and record. When you stop, the editor opens with zooms already made from your clicks and typing, the cursor turned into a steady glide, and your default style applied: background, padding, corners, shadow and, if you like, a macOS or Windows title bar. You trim the ends, make captions if you want them, and pick an export preset for YouTube, Shorts and Reels, Instagram or a GIF. The full routine is in the guide on how to record a product demo video on Windows.

What Focal's editor does not have is just as plain: no tracks for other videos or slides, no transitions between scenes, no quizzes. It has text, arrows, boxes, highlights, numbered badges and images over the recording, blur for private details, a logo in a corner, intro and end title cards, chapter titles, and music and voiceover clips on their own lane. If your video is a lesson assembled from many pieces, that is a real limit.

How each one handles zoom

Camtasia gives you two ways to zoom. By hand, the Zoom-n-Pan tool lets you move and resize a rectangle over the preview, and a zoom animation appears on the timeline, or you drag a Scale Up animation onto a clip and time it with arrows on the timeline. Automatically, SmartFocus follows the mouse movements, scrolling and clicks in a recording made with Camtasia's recorder and decides where to zoom in, zoom out or pan. TechSmith's tutorial says SmartFocus is optimized for recordings longer than 30 seconds and replaces any animations already on the clip, so they advise applying it first and adding your own zooms after.

Focal makes its zooms when you stop recording, from what you choose: clicks, right clicks, other buttons, typing, shortcuts or scrolling. The camera eases in and out like a spring, zooms close together join into one that pans, and the camera waits for each click rather than drifting to the next, so it never gives away the plot. To adjust, drag on the zoom lane or press Z to add a zoom, press K for a keyframe that moves the focus or changes the level, or click the video to pick a focus. Each zoom has its own level and hold time, and the speed is Slow, Smooth or Snappy. When you change the zoom settings, the automatic zooms update at once and the ones you edited stay the way you left them. More in the guide on adding zoom effects to a screen recording.

So both can zoom for you and both let you take over. In Focal automatic is the default result of every recording, in Camtasia it is an animation you apply.

How each one handles the cursor

Camtasia records the screen and the cursor separately in its own recording format (TREC), so after recording you can scale the cursor, hide it, smooth its path, fix where it goes when it does not match the narration, add or edit clicks and swap it for another image. There is a long list of cursor and click effects too: spotlight, highlight, magnify, rings, ripples, a click sound. Those edits apply to Camtasia's own recordings, and Rev media has to be unpacked before you customize the cursor in the editor.

Focal works on the same idea: the screen is recorded without the cursor, and its position, clicks and shape are logged a thousand times a second on the same clock as the video. I wrote about why Focal records your screen without the cursor. The difference is again in the defaults. A raw mouse path, played back, looks like it was drawn on a bus, and Focal turns it into a steady glide without you asking. Each click gets a ring, a dot or a pulse, and the standard cursors are drawn as vectors, light or dark, so they stay sharp at any zoom. The cursor fades when idle and comes back when you move.

Captions, and where they are made

Camtasia turns the voice-over on the timeline into captions with speech-to-text, on Windows and on Mac, and you review them in its Caption Editor. TechSmith's page on the AI technology in its products lists Camtasia's speech-to-text as processed on the device, on both systems. Captions can be closed, so viewers switch them on, or burned in, and they import and export as SRT, VTT or SAMI files. Dynamic captions give a styled, social-video look. Caption generation starts at the Essentials plan, which also has text-based editing and filler word removal.

Focal makes captions with a speech model that runs on your computer, about 190 MB, downloaded the first time. It reads the words on screen as hints, so names and terms like useEffect come out right, and it leaves out the phrases speech models make up over typing and clapping. It handles 26 languages. You can correct any line, save an .srt, export captions as a track viewers switch on, or draw them into the picture in one of six looks or your own. You can also select words in the captions list to cut them from the video, or cut every "um" and "uh" in one click.

So on captions, privacy is not what separates them, and I say that as someone who would have enjoyed winning this round. The guide on adding captions to a screen recording without uploading it covers Focal's side.

What each one costs

Camtasia is an annual subscription. TechSmith's support pages say it moved to a subscription-only model with Camtasia 2025 in January 2025, and the store lists four plans for individuals, each billed yearly:

Starter, $39 a year: screen capture, with the Camtasia Editor watermarked
Essentials, $179.88 a year: watermark-free exports, plus captions, quizzes and SCORM export
Create, $249 a year: adds generated scripts and voiceovers
Pro, $599 a year: adds avatars, translation, dubbing and stock assets

Teams, businesses and schools are priced separately, and individual plans cannot be transferred.

Focal is $99 once, or $79 with the code LAUNCH at checkout while the launch lasts. That covers one person on up to 3 computers, commercial use, and every update for 12 months. After that the version you have keeps working with no reminder and no lock, and an optional $49 renewal extends updates by another year. The pricing page has the details, and I wrote about why Focal costs $99 once and not $10 a month.

Here is the arithmetic, which I checked more carefully than anything else on this page, since a mistake in my favor would not look like a mistake. Over three years, Camtasia Essentials comes to $539.64. Focal comes to $99 if you keep the version you bought, or $197 if you renew updates twice. That gap matters if you would use Camtasia mostly to record and polish demos. Its subscription also pays for a Mac version and a much larger editor, and if you use those, you are paying for something Focal does not offer.

Focal and Camtasia side by side

Camtasia facts checked on 2026-11-02 on techsmith.com.

Feature	Focal	Camtasia
Systems	Windows 10 (21H2 or later) and 11, 64-bit	Windows 10 and 11, macOS 14 or later
Price	$99 once	$39 to $599 a year, Essentials $179.88 a year
After you stop paying	The version you have keeps working	Subscription only since Camtasia 2025
Trial	No time limit, every feature, no exporting until you buy a license	Editor free to use, exports watermarked until you buy a plan
Automatic zoom	Made when you stop, from clicks, typing and more	SmartFocus, applied to Camtasia recordings
Zoom by hand	Zoom lane, keyframes, level, hold and speed	Zoom-n-Pan rectangle and scale animations
Cursor	Recorded as data, glide, vector cursors, click ripples	Recorded as data, scale, hide, smooth, click effects
Captions	On your computer, 26 languages, .srt or switchable track	On the device, closed or burned in, SRT, VTT or SAMI
Timeline with other media	No, one recording at a time	Yes, tracks for any media
Callouts and annotations	Text, arrows, boxes, highlights, badges, images	Yes
Transitions between scenes	No	Yes
Quizzes and SCORM export	No	Yes, from Essentials
Generated voiceovers and avatars	No	Create and Pro plans

Who should pick Camtasia

Pick Camtasia if you make courses and need quizzes or SCORM export into a learning platform. Pick it if you cut many sources together: several recordings, slides, camera footage and music on one timeline. Pick it if you or your team work on a Mac, since Focal does not run there, or if generated voiceovers and avatars are part of how you work. For all of that, Camtasia is the stronger tool, and it is not close. That is an odd sentence to publish on my own website, and a true one.

Who should pick Focal

Pick Focal if you are on Windows and you record demos, walkthroughs, feature announcements or bug reports, and you want them to look edited without becoming a video editor for the afternoon. The zooms, the cursor and the frame are done when you stop, and your look is saved as a style you can give to any recording in one step, as the styles section of the home page shows. Pick it if you would rather pay once than every year. Focal has no account, no sign-in and no telemetry, and your recordings stay on your computer.

The fastest way to tell is to record the same two-minute demo in both. Focal's trial is free with every feature, no time limit and no card, on the download page, and exporting needs a license.

Focal vs Cursorful for screen recordings on Windows

support@focalcapture.com (Vince) — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Cursorful is a screen recorder with automatic zooms that starts as a free extension for Chrome, Edge and Brave, on macOS, Windows and Linux, and adds desktop apps for Windows and Apple silicon Macs in its paid Pro tier. Focal, a screen recorder for Windows, is a desktop app from the start: it records any window, region or monitor, with system audio, a camera, captions made on your computer and keystroke pills. Its recordings never leave the machine, and you buy it once. For a quick demo of a web app on a Mac or a Linux machine, pick Cursorful. For anything outside the browser on Windows, or for a recorder with no cloud at all, pick Focal.

My name is Vince. I make Focal, so this comparison was written by one of the contestants, which is a bit like letting one of the runners hold the stopwatch. I have kept my thumb off the button, and where Cursorful wins, I say so. Every fact about Cursorful here comes from cursorful.com, checked on 2026-11-02.

What Cursorful does well

The free extension is a good piece of software, with no sign-up, no watermark and no time limit. You record the browser, and Cursorful places zooms and pans on your clicks and typing. Its FAQ says an automatic zoom starts when two or more clicks land within 3 seconds, so the picture does not zoom all the time, which I think is the right instinct. A recorder that lunges at every single click turns a two-minute demo into two minutes of seasickness. You can reshape zooms on a timeline, hide the browser's tabs and bookmarks, put a gradient or an image behind the recording, and export MP4 or GIF at 60 fps in ten aspect-ratio presets, rendered on your device. For a clean clip of a web app on whatever laptop happens to be open, that is hard to beat for free.

Pro adds the microphone with noise removal, a webcam that can blur or remove the background behind you, captions made from your audio on your device, 4K exports, cloud projects with real-time collaboration, and Cursorful Pro Desktop, a Mac and Windows app that records the whole screen and crops to the active window in the editor. Share links work with a free account.

What a browser extension cannot reach

Cursorful is unusually clear about the limits of its extension, and I mean that as a compliment, since most product pages treat their limits like a family secret. Its FAQ says the extension records the whole desktop but crops the result to the browser. Switch to another app and it keeps recording, still cropped to the browser, and automatic and follow-cursor zooms stop, because an extension cannot see mouse events outside the browser. Its features page adds that the extension records system audio only when Chrome offers to share it, that a smoothed cursor needs a Pro Desktop recording, and that the free plan exports up to 1080p, without the microphone, camera or captions, for non-commercial use. Firefox and Safari are not supported.

So for a Windows user the real question is Cursorful Pro Desktop against Focal, and that is what the rest of this page compares.

How Focal records, and what it adds

Focal sits in the system tray until you need it. Press Print Screen, then drag a region, click a window to snap to it, or press Enter for the whole screen. A window recording can leave out the app's own title bar, or, in Chrome, Edge and other Chromium browsers, everything but the page, which covers the web demo too. On Windows 11, system audio can leave out one app or record only one, so the chat notification that always lands at the best moment of the take stays out of the tutorial. The guide to recording system audio and your microphone at the same time goes through it.

The cursor is data, not pixels

Focal records the screen without the cursor and logs its position, clicks and shape a thousand times a second, on the same clock as the video. Cursorful Pro Desktop also records the cursor apart from the screen, so on this point the two desktop apps agree. I wrote a whole piece on why Focal records without the cursor, which gives you a rough idea of how much of my life cursors now occupy. Because the cursor is data, Focal turns a shaky mouse path into a steady glide with a ripple on each click, draws standard cursors as vectors that stay sharp at any zoom, and fades the cursor when it sits idle.

Zooms from clicks and typing

When you stop, the editor opens with zooms already made. You choose what starts one: clicks, right clicks, other buttons, typing, shortcuts or scrolling. Zooms close together join into one that pans, and the camera waits for each click instead of drifting on to the next. Z adds a zoom by hand and K a keyframe that moves the focus. How to add zoom effects to a screen recording covers the details.

Captions, camera and keystrokes

Captions are made by a speech model that runs on your computer, in 26 languages. It reads the words on screen as hints, so terms like useEffect come out right instead of as "use a fact". You can correct a line, save an .srt, export a track viewers switch on, cut words straight from the transcript, or cut every "um" and "uh" in one click. Cursorful's Pro captions are also made on your device, so neither app uploads your voice.

The camera sits in a corner as a circle, a rounded square, or a wide or tall rectangle, or anywhere you place it at any size, with keyframes that move it during the recording. Cursorful can blur or remove the background behind your camera, and Focal cannot. Keystroke pills show shortcuts like Ctrl+C at the bottom or top of the video, timed with your cuts.

Styles and export shapes

A style saves the background, padding, corners, shadow, cursor, zoom feel, camera and captions under a name, so every recording in a series matches, and episode six does not look like it came from a different channel. Export MP4 (H.264 or HEVC) up to 4K at 60 fps, or GIF, in 16:9, 9:16, 1:1, 4:5, 21:9 or the source's own shape, with zooms and captions re-aimed for each.

What Focal does not do matters here too: no share links, no cloud projects, no team workspace, no Mac and no Linux.

Where your recordings live

Both keep recordings on your computer by default. Cursorful renders on your device and says nothing is uploaded unless you share a link or use a cloud feature. Pro includes 15 GB of pooled cloud storage, with more at $0.05 per GB per month. Its privacy policy, last updated on 2026-10-29, describes product analytics on actions such as starting a recording or exporting, with usage data collected upon your consent, and says these never include the content of your recordings or anything you type.

Focal has no account, no sign-in, no telemetry and no crash reporting. I have no idea how many times you pressed record today, and I would like to keep it that way. Recordings, edits and captions are made and kept in Videos\Focal or a folder you pick. The few things that do leave the computer, such as the license check and the daily update check, are each listed in the privacy note. If you need a link, you upload the exported MP4 wherever you share video. For some teams that is a chore, and for others it is the whole point.

What they cost

Cursorful's free plan costs nothing, forever, for non-commercial use. Pro was $79 per seat as a one-time payment on 2026-11-02, a launch price against a list price of $119. It covers commercial use for one person, Pro Desktop on two devices, and lifetime access to current and future offline features. Refunds are offered within 14 days.

Focal is $99 once, or $79 with the code LAUNCH at checkout, for one person on up to 3 computers. Every update in the following 12 months is included, and after that the version you have keeps working with no lock. An optional $49 renewal adds another year. Students, teachers and researchers get 40% off by email, and refunds are offered within 14 days.

At launch prices the two cost the same, to the dollar, which spares you some arithmetic. Cursorful's free plan goes further than Focal's free trial for personal projects: it exports a video, and Focal exports nothing until you buy a license. Its promise of future offline features for life is also more generous than Focal's year of updates. I would rather tell you that here than have you find it on their page and wonder what else I left out.

Focal and Cursorful side by side

Facts about Cursorful checked on 2026-11-02 on cursorful.com.

Feature	Focal	Cursorful
Runs on	Windows 10 (21H2 or later) and Windows 11, 64-bit	Extension: Chrome, Edge and Brave on macOS, Windows and Linux. Pro Desktop: Windows 10 and 11, Apple silicon Macs
What it records	A window, a region or a monitor, chosen before you record	Extension: the browser. Pro Desktop: the whole screen, cropped to the active window in the editor
Automatic zooms	Clicks, right clicks, other buttons, typing, shortcuts, scrolling	Clicks and typing, in the extension only while the browser is focused
Cursor recorded apart from the picture	Yes	Pro Desktop
Microphone and camera	Yes	Pro
System audio	Yes, and on Windows 11 one app left out or only one app	Pro Desktop, or the extension when Chrome offers it
Captions	On your computer, 26 languages, .srt or a switchable track	Pro, on your device
Keystroke pills	Yes	Not listed on cursorful.com
Export	MP4 (H.264 or HEVC) up to 4K 60 fps, GIF	MP4 or GIF at 60 fps, 1080p free, up to 4K on Pro
Share links and cloud projects	No	Share links with a free account, cloud projects on Pro
Price	$99 once, $79 with LAUNCH	Free for non-commercial use, Pro $79 once per seat
Updates	12 months, then an optional $49 renewal	Lifetime access to current and future offline features
Devices	Up to 3 computers	2 desktop devices, 3 browser profiles
Before you pay	Record and edit with every feature, no time limit, no exporting	Free plan, no watermark, 1080p, no microphone, camera or captions in exports

Who should pick which

Pick Cursorful if:

you record web apps on a Mac or a Linux machine
you want a free recorder for personal projects and can do without narration and 4K
you want share links and real-time collaboration built in
you want the background behind your camera blurred or removed

Pick Focal if:

what you record on Windows lives outside the browser: an editor, a terminal, a desktop app
you want to choose a window, a region or a monitor before recording, not crop afterwards
you want keystroke pills, captions saved as .srt, or editing by the transcript
you want no account, no analytics and no cloud

If you came looking for a recorder like Screen Studio on Windows, Screen Studio for Windows: what to use instead covers the wider field. If you need a plain recording and none of this, how to record your screen on Windows 11 goes through every built-in way.

The fastest way to decide is to record the same two-minute demo in both. Budget three takes of each, because nobody gets a demo right the first time, me included. Cursorful's extension costs nothing to try, and Focal is free to record and edit with every feature, with no time limit, no card and no account, from the download page.

Focal vs FocuSee: two auto-zoom recorders for Windows

support@focalcapture.com (Vince) — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMT

FocuSee and Focal, a screen recorder for Windows, are the two apps a Windows buyer usually weighs when they want a recording that zooms in by itself. Both turn clicks and typing into zooms, restyle the cursor after recording and frame the video on a background. FocuSee does more: it runs on a Mac too, records phones, and adds a teleprompter, 3D motion, AI avatars and share links. Focal does less and does it differently: it records the screen without the cursor, makes captions on your computer using the words on screen, and costs $99 once with no account and no credits.

My name is Vince, and I make Focal, which makes me about the least impartial person you could ask to write this. To make up for it, every fact about FocuSee here comes from its own site and its maker's privacy policy, checked on 2026-11-02, and the list of things FocuSee does that Focal does not comes early, not in small print at the bottom.

What the two have in common

FocuSee is made by iMobie Inc. and runs on Windows 10 or later and macOS 10.15 or later. Focal runs on Windows 10 (version 21H2 or later) and Windows 11, 64-bit, and nothing else.

The overlap is large. Both make zooms from your clicks and typing, and in both you can move those zooms or turn them off. Both let you restyle the cursor after recording, with click effects and a click sound, and add motion blur, a background, rounded corners and a shadow. Both record your camera, microphone and system sound along with the screen. Both show keystrokes, make captions you can correct, take background noise out of your voice, remove filler words and silences, add music and save presets. Both annotate a recording with text, arrows and shapes, and both blur details that should not be in it. Both reshape one recording for YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, export MP4 up to 4K at 60 fps or a GIF, and keep recordings on your computer by default.

Either one will save your viewers from squinting at a 4K desktop on a phone. The differences are in how each gets there, and in what else comes along.

What FocuSee has that Focal does not

All of this is from FocuSee's home page, guide, FAQ and store:

A Mac version. Focal is Windows only, with no Mac, Linux or phone version.
Phone recording of an iPhone, iPad or Android device connected by USB.
A teleprompter that shows your script while you record.
3D motion, a tilt and perspective that follows your cursor.
More camera tools: background removal and a beauty filter. Focal places the camera anywhere at any size, and can move it during the recording, but it shows your room as it is.
AI avatars, paid with AI credits.
Share links. FocuSee uploads a video to its cloud and gives you a link with an optional password, and its paid plans include 5 GB of cloud storage. Focal has no cloud and no links. You send the file.
Importing other videos to edit. Focal edits the recordings it made.
More languages. FocuSee lists speech recognition in more than 50. Focal's captions cover 26.
A longer refund window: 60 days on yearly and one-time plans, against Focal's 14.
Store listings in the Microsoft Store and the Mac App Store. Focal is a 9 MB installer that is not code-signed yet, so Edge and Windows SmartScreen warn about it the first time.

If your work depends on any of these, pick FocuSee. I would rather lose a sale here than have you find out on deadline day.

What Focal does differently

The cursor is recorded as data

Focal records the screen without the cursor in it. The cursor's position, clicks and shape are logged a thousand times a second, on the same clock as the video, along with key timings. FocuSee also changes the cursor after recording, and its home page says its cursor tracking runs on your computer. In Focal that data drives everything that moves. The standard cursors are drawn as vectors, sharp at any zoom, or you use the captured cursor or your own image, and mouse paths become a steady glide with a ring, a dot or a pulse on each click. The glide makes the arrow look as if it always knew where it was going. Mine never does. The reasoning is in why Focal records your screen without the cursor.

The zooms ease in and out like a spring, zooms close together join into one that pans, and the camera waits for each click rather than drifting toward the next. You choose what starts a zoom, and changing that rebuilds the automatic zooms at once, while the ones you edited stay as they are. Press Z to add a zoom by hand and K for a keyframe that moves the focus. The zoom section on the home page shows it in motion.

Captions made on your computer, reading the screen

Focal's captions come from a speech model that runs on your computer, about 190 MB, downloaded the first time. It reads the words on screen as hints, so names and terms like useEffect come out right instead of as two words and a shrug, and it leaves out the phrases speech models make up over typing and clapping. There are no credits and no cost per minute. Correct any line, save an .srt, export a track viewers can switch on, or draw the captions into the picture in one of six looks or your own.

FocuSee has a free Local Model and an Advanced Model at one credit a minute with higher accuracy and more languages, and its guide says its AI subtitles feature "uses an advanced online AI model." The steps for Focal are in how to add captions to a screen recording without uploading it.

Editing by the transcript

Select words in Focal's captions list and cut them from the video, cut every "um" and "uh" in one click, or tighten long pauses, while the pauses where you click or type stay put. FocuSee removes silences and filler words at one credit a minute. In Focal it comes with the price.

Keystroke pills and a camera in sync

Keystrokes are off by default. Shortcuts shows combinations like Ctrl+C as a pill, Everything shows all typing, and both stay timed through cuts and speed changes. Focal warns before you export a project that logged everything, since that includes passwords, and a password is the one thing a tutorial should never teach. FocuSee shows keystrokes too, with its own style settings.

Focal measures each microphone's delay while you record and corrects it, so voice and picture line up. The camera is a circle, a rounded square, or a wide or tall rectangle, with an optional border and shadow, anywhere in the frame.

Styles you name and reuse

A Focal style saves the background, padding, corners, shadow, cursor, zoom feel, camera bubble and captions under a name, to apply in one step, set as the default or export as a file. Set one up once and your fortieth recording matches your first. There are twelve ready-made backgrounds, an optional macOS or Windows title bar, a logo, title cards, and the shapes 16:9, 9:16, 1:1, 4:5, 21:9 and the source's own, with zooms and captions re-aimed for each. FocuSee has custom presets too.

Privacy and where your files live

FocuSee's home page says recordings are saved on your computer by default, cloud upload is optional, and cursor tracking, click detection and shortcut recognition are processed on your device. A paid copy is activated by signing in with an iMobie or Google account. iMobie's privacy policy, updated September 25, 2025, says videos shared by link are stored on Amazon Web Services. It says FocuSee's AI features may process uploaded audio, video or images on its servers and cache them until done, without training AI models on them unless you consent. It also says its apps may collect usage data and crash reports, which differ by product.

Focal has no account, no telemetry and no crash reporting. That cuts both ways: if Focal ever crashes on you, I only find out if you tell me. Recordings, edits and captions stay in Videos\Focal or a folder you pick. Four things leave your computer: the license check to Polar once a key is entered (about once a day, and a licensed copy works 28 days offline), the daily update check, the speech model download the first time you make captions, and one Windows component during installation if your system lacks it. The full list is in the privacy note.

The trade is real: FocuSee's cloud is what makes its share links possible, and Focal cannot give you a link.

Price and licensing

FocuSee's store listed these plans on 2026-11-02, shown as discounts from higher list prices:

Standard, 1 computer: $19.99 a month or $49.99 a year.
Advanced, up to 3 computers, 300 AI credits a month: $24.99 a month or $79.99 a year.
Advanced one-time, up to 5 computers: $199.99, with lifetime access to FocuSee 2.x and 1,000 credits valid for a year. The next major version costs extra, with a discount.

The free version records, edits and exports one video, with a watermark and no sharing. Refunds run 7 days on monthly plans and 60 days on the others, minus credits used.

Focal is $99 once, or $79 with the code LAUNCH during the launch, for one person on up to 3 computers, commercial use included, with every update for 12 months. After that your version keeps working, and an optional $49 renewal adds a year of updates. Nothing is metered, there is no subscription, and refunds are within 14 days, no questions asked. The free trial has no time limit: recording and editing work with every feature, with no card or account, and exporting waits for a license key.

For one computer and one year, FocuSee Standard costs less than Focal, and no amount of creative arithmetic on my part changes that. Over two years it reaches $99.98, about Focal's one price. The reasoning behind that price is in why Focal costs $99 once and not $10 a month.

FocuSee and Focal side by side

Checked on 2026-11-02 on FocuSee's site, store, guide and FAQ, and iMobie's privacy policy. Prices in US dollars.

Feature	FocuSee	Focal
Maker	iMobie Inc.	Vince, one developer, sold by VMEDIA LLC
Runs on	Windows 10 or later, macOS 10.15 or later	Windows 10 (21H2 or later), Windows 11, 64-bit
Price	$19.99 a month, $49.99 a year, or $199.99 once	$99 once
Computers	1, 3, or 5 on the one-time plan	3
AI credits	For online subtitles, filler removal, voice enhancement, avatars	None
Free use	One export, watermarked	Record and edit with no time limit, no export
Account	Sign-in to activate	None
Automatic zoom	Yes	Yes
Cursor after recording	Restyled	Restyled, logged as data
Captions	Free Local Model, or online at 1 credit a minute	On your computer, 26 languages, reads the screen
Filler words and silences	1 credit a minute	One click, no credits
Camera	Layouts, background removal, beauty filter	Four shapes, microphone delay corrected
Annotations	Yes	Yes
Teleprompter, 3D motion	Yes	No
Phone recording	iPhone, iPad, Android over USB	No
Share links and cloud	Yes, 5 GB on paid plans	No
Export	MP4 up to 4K at 60 fps, GIF	MP4 (H.264 or HEVC) up to 4K at 60 fps, GIF
Refund	7 days monthly, 60 days yearly and one-time	14 days

Who should pick which

Pick FocuSee if you also work on a Mac, record phone apps, want a teleprompter or 3D motion, need share links, or want your camera background removed. It is also cheaper for one computer for one year.

Pick Focal if you record on Windows only and want one price with nothing metered, captions made on your computer that get your product's names right, editing by the transcript, a camera in sync with your voice, and no account.

If Screen Studio is the app you had in mind, Screen Studio for Windows covers what to use instead. Otherwise record the same thing in both and trust your own eyes over mine: FocuSee's free version gives you one export, and Focal's trial gives you no export and no deadline, with the preview to judge by.

Focal vs Loom: recorded locally or shared from the cloud

support@focalcapture.com (Vince) — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Loom and Focal both record your screen on Windows, so they end up in the same searches, but they are hired for different jobs. Loom is video messaging: you record, the video lands in your Loom workspace, and you send a link your team can watch, comment on and react to. Focal, a screen recorder for Windows, records to a file on your computer and makes it look edited, with zooms, a smooth cursor, captions and a frame. When a link to a quick explanation is the point, Loom is the right tool. When the recording is a demo or a tutorial, when you would rather it never left your computer, or when you do not want a subscription, Focal is.

My name is Vince. I make Focal, which means this comparison was written by one of the two products in it. I have tried to be fair anyway: where Loom is the better choice I say so plainly, and every fact about Loom below comes from Loom's own pages.

What Loom is for

Loom's home page describes it as a way to record and share AI-powered video messages with teammates and customers, and that is a fair summary. You record your screen, and the video becomes a page with a link. Viewers can leave comments and emoji reactions, the video can be embedded in other work tools, and Loom shows you who has watched it. The free Starter plan allows a workspace of up to 50 members.

And yes, Loom works on Windows. Its device compatibility page lists a desktop app for Windows 10 or above, with 8 GB of memory at minimum and 16 GB recommended, alongside a Mac app, a Chrome extension, and apps for iOS and Android. Loom has been part of Atlassian since October 2023, its help pages now live on Atlassian's support site, and Jira and Confluence are among the tools it connects to.

Put together, that is hard to beat for a bug explained in two minutes rather than in a meeting where five people watch one person hunt for the right tab, or for a reply to a customer who needs to see where a setting is. A recording like that does not have to be pretty. It has to arrive, and Loom is very good at making it arrive.

What Focal is for

Focal is for the recording you publish or keep: a product demo, a tutorial, a launch video, a clip for a README or a pull request. You press Print Screen, pick a region, a window or the whole screen, and record. When you stop, the editor opens with zooms already made from your clicks and typing. From there you set the cursor, captions, background and frame, or give the recording a saved style in one step, then export an MP4 up to 4K at 60 fps, or a GIF, to a folder on your computer.

What Focal does not do matters just as much, so here it is plainly. There is no cloud, no share link, no viewer analytics and no team workspace. If you need to know whether your manager watched the video, Focal cannot tell you. You will have to find out the old way, by asking and watching their face.

How the recording itself differs

The biggest difference is what gets saved when you press record. Focal records the screen without the cursor in it and logs the cursor's position, clicks and shape as data, a thousand times a second, on the same clock as the video. Key timings are logged the same way. That is why the zooms, the cursor, the captions, the camera and the frame can all be changed after you record, instead of being settled for good the moment you press stop. Most recorders bake the cursor into the pixels. I wrote up why Focal records without the cursor if you want the longer reason.

In practice that means:

Zooms follow your clicks and bursts of typing, easing in and out like a camera on a spring, and you can add, move, reshape or delete any of them on the zoom lane.
The cursor glides instead of jittering, with a ripple on each click, and the standard cursors are drawn as vectors, sharp at any zoom.
Captions are made on your computer by a speech model that runs there, in 26 languages, and you can correct any line, cut words from the video by selecting them in the captions list, or cut every "um" and "uh" in one click.
A style saves the background, corners, shadow, camera bubble, captions and more by name, so every video in a series looks the same.

Loom's features are aimed at the message rather than the picture. Its free plan lists transcriptions in more than 50 languages. Its Business + AI plan adds Loom AI: automatic titles, summaries and chapters, filler word removal and silence removal, and workflows that turn a video into a written document or fill in a Jira or Linear ticket from it. All of that makes a video quicker to send and quicker to understand, which is the whole job of a message. Loom's AI page also says that OpenAI receives transcripts as text to write titles and summaries, but not the video or the audio.

Focal's nearest equivalents, cutting filler words and tightening long pauses, happen on your computer with nothing sent anywhere. Focal does not write titles, summaries or tickets for you. The title is still yours to agonize over.

Where the files live, and why it matters

With Loom, the video lives in your Loom library on Loom's service, and the link is the product. On the free Starter plan you cannot download your own videos: Loom's help page on downloading says so directly. On Business and Business + AI, admins and creators can download a video as an MP4, up to 20 GB. Loom works through an account and a workspace, which is exactly what you want when a team shares videos, and exactly what you do not want for a recording that shows a client's data, an unreleased product or your own inbox.

With Focal there is no account to make and nothing to sign in to. Recordings, edits and captions are made and kept on your computer, in Videos\Focal or a folder you pick, each recording a folder of its own. There is no telemetry and no crash reporting. Four things leave your computer and nothing else: the license check once you enter a key, the daily update check (which you can turn off in Settings), the speech model download the first time you make captions, and a Windows component the installer fetches if your computer lacks it. The privacy note lists each one. Because captions are made on your computer, what you say in a recording is never sent anywhere to be transcribed.

This is the reason I built Focal the way I did, and I wrote about it at more length in your screen recording should stay on your computer. A screen recording catches more than you meant to show: a notification from the group chat, a browser tab you forgot was open, a file name you would rather not explain. When the file is on your computer, you see it before anyone else does.

The trade-off is real, and it lands on you. Sharing a Focal recording is your job: you export an MP4 and put it on YouTube, your website, a pull request or a chat. If you want to hand the editable project to someone who also uses Focal, the Projects window packs a recording into a single .focalproj file they open with a double-click. None of that is a share link with view counts, and it is not trying to be.

What each one costs

Loom is a subscription billed per user. On its pricing page, Starter is free, with 25 videos per person, screen recordings up to 5 minutes and quality up to 720p. Business is $18 per user per month billed monthly, with unlimited videos and recording time, quality up to 4K, uploads and downloads, and no Loom branding. Business + AI is $24 per user per month and adds Loom AI. Enterprise is priced through sales. Loom's FAQ says paying annually saves 17%.

Focal is $99 once, or $79 at launch with the code LAUNCH at checkout. That covers one person on up to 3 computers, with every update published in the following 12 months. After that, the version you have keeps working with no reminder and no lock, and an optional $49 renewal adds another year of updates. Commercial use is included, and you can get a refund within 14 days of buying. The details are on the pricing page, and my reasons are in why Focal costs $99 once and not $10 a month.

For one person, Loom's Business plan at the monthly price passes Focal's one-time price in the sixth month. I will admit that comparison is a little unfair to Loom, because a Loom subscription pays for hosting, links and viewer insights that Focal does not offer at all. It is a bit like comparing a gym membership with a set of dumbbells: only one of them comes with a building.

If you would rather try it before doing any arithmetic, Focal is free to record and edit with every feature, with no time limit, no card and no account. Exporting needs a license, and until you enter a key the editor's preview shows a "Made with Focal" watermark.

Focal and Loom side by side

Loom's details were checked on 2026-11-02 on loom.com and Loom's help pages. Plans change more often than comparison articles do, so look again before you buy.

Feature	Focal	Loom
What it is	A screen recorder that makes recordings look edited	Video messaging with share links
Platforms	Windows 10 (21H2 or later) and Windows 11, 64-bit	Windows 10 or above, Mac, Chrome extension, iOS, Android
Where videos are kept	On your computer	In your Loom library, online
Account	None	A Loom account and workspace
Share links, viewer insights, comments	No	Yes
Editing	Zooms, cursor, captions, camera, styles and frame, all changeable after recording	Basic editing on Business, advanced editing and Loom AI on Business + AI
Captions and transcripts	Made on your computer, 26 languages	Transcriptions in 50+ languages
Getting a video file	Export MP4 up to 4K 60 fps, or GIF, with a license	MP4 download on Business and above, not on Starter
Free option	Record and edit with every feature, no time limit, exporting needs a license	Starter: 25 videos per person, 5-minute recordings, up to 720p
Price	$99 once, one person, up to 3 computers	$18 (Business) or $24 (Business + AI) per user per month, billed monthly
Made by	Vince, one developer, sold by VMEDIA LLC	Atlassian, since October 2023

Which one should you pick

Pick Loom when the link is the point

You explain things to a team that is not in the same room, you want to know who watched, you want comments under the video, or your company already lives in Jira and Confluence. Loom's free plan is enough for short messages. Loom also runs on Macs and phones, and Focal only runs on Windows, so a team on mixed computers is covered by Loom and not by Focal. Focal has nothing like Loom's sharing, and I would not pretend it does.

Pick Focal when the video is the point

You are recording a product demo, a tutorial, a launch video or a clip for a README, and you want it to look edited without the "quick" edit that somehow takes all evening. You would be uncomfortable seeing the recording on someone else's server before you have watched it yourself. You want captions made without uploading anything. Or you would simply rather pay once than per user per month. The guide to recording a product demo video on Windows walks through a full recording, and adding captions to a screen recording without uploading it covers the captions.

Use both when you do both kinds of work

Plenty of people should. Loom for the two-minute reply to a teammate, Focal for the video that goes on the website. A Focal export is an ordinary MP4, so if you want it in your Loom library too, Loom's pricing page lists uploading videos on Business and above.

If you are not sure which you need, download the Focal trial, record the next thing you would have sent as a Loom, and see whether what you made is a message or a video.

Focal vs OBS Studio for demo videos

support@focalcapture.com (Vince) — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMT

If you stream, combine several sources in one picture, capture games, work on a Mac or Linux, or need something free, use OBS Studio. If you record software demos on Windows and want them to come out zoomed on your clicks, with a smooth cursor, captions and a frame, with no scene to set up beforehand and no editing session afterwards, use Focal, a screen recorder for Windows. OBS can make a good demo, but it asks for setup before you record and an editor after. Focal does that one job, and it costs $99 once where OBS is free.

My name is Vince. I make Focal, so you are watching a game refereed by someone who owns one of the teams, and you should weigh the calls with that in mind. OBS makes fairness easy: it is excellent software, and this is not a takedown. Everything here about OBS was checked on its own site and knowledge base on 2026-11-02.

What OBS Studio is built for

OBS Studio calls itself "free and open source software for video recording and live streaming." It runs on Windows 10 and 11, macOS 13 or newer, and Linux, and its model is the broadcast. You build scenes out of sources (a display, a window, a game, a webcam, images, text, a browser page, a capture card) and switch between them while you stream or record. Around that sit an audio mixer with filters such as noise suppression, transitions, a Studio Mode that previews a scene before it goes live, hotkeys for almost everything, and plugins and scripts in Lua or Python. Add it all up and you have a television control room that costs nothing, which I still find slightly unreal.

That model is why OBS can do nearly anything. It is also why an OBS recording is exactly what the scene looked like while you recorded: OBS composes the picture live and writes it to a video file, and the file is what you get.

What a demo needs that OBS leaves to you

A demo watched on a laptop or a phone needs zooms so the viewer can read what you clicked, a cursor that is easy to follow, captions for people watching with the sound off, a frame, and often a second shape for Shorts. In OBS, each of these is a job for you. Here is how each one goes.

Zooming in on what you click

You can crop and resize a capture in the scene by hand, or reach for one of the community scripts listed on the OBS forum, such as Zoom to Mouse, which zooms a display capture toward the cursor when you press a hotkey. Either way the zoom happens while you record and lands in the picture. If it came late or framed the wrong thing, the fix is an editor or another take, and the take is always the one where everything else finally went right.

The cursor is in the pixels

Display, window and game capture in OBS each have a Capture Cursor setting, on by default. On, the cursor is captured into the picture. Off, it is left out. You make that choice before you press record, and from then on the cursor is pixels like everything else on screen: a video file does not let you make it larger, smooth its path or change its look. If you circled the Save button three times while you worked out what to say, the video will remember that for you. For a recording with no cursor at all, there is a guide on how to record your screen without the cursor on Windows.

Captions for viewers with the sound off

The OBS community has caption plugins. LocalVocal, listed on the OBS forum, runs a speech model on your computer and can save captions as an .srt file. The other route is a captioning tool once you have stopped recording. Either way, the setup is yours, and so is the job of putting the captions and the video together.

A frame around the recording

A frame in OBS is something you build into the scene: an image or color source behind the capture, with the capture resized to leave a margin. Once it is built, the scene is there for the next recording, which is one of the genuinely nice things about working in scenes.

How Focal handles each

Focal records one window, region or monitor. Press Print Screen, then drag a region, click a window or press Enter for the whole screen. A small panel sets the microphone, system audio, camera and keystrokes before each recording. Your choices are kept for next time, except Everything for keystrokes. There is no scene to build. A key press and a rectangle are about as much ceremony as a demo deserves.

The part that makes the rest possible: Focal records the screen without the cursor in it, and logs the cursor's position, clicks and shape as data, a thousand times a second, on the same clock as the video. Because the cursor and your clicks are data rather than pixels, everything that depends on them is made after you stop, and can be changed again later.

Zooms. The editor opens with zooms already made from your clicks and bursts of typing. They ease in and out like a spring, zooms close together join into one that pans, and you choose what starts one. Press Z to add a zoom by hand, or K for a keyframe that moves the focus or changes the level. The zoom section of the home page shows one moving.
The cursor. Raw mouse paths become a steady glide with a ripple on each click. The standard cursors are drawn as vectors, so they stay sharp at any zoom and any size, with an optional halo or spotlight.
Captions. A speech model that runs on your computer (about 190 MB, downloaded the first time) writes them in 26 languages. Correct any line, save an .srt, export a track viewers can switch on, or draw them into the picture in one of six looks.
The frame. A background, padding, corners, a shadow and an optional macOS or Windows title bar, saved as a Style that any recording takes in one step.
Shapes. 16:9, 9:16, 1:1, 4:5, 21:9 or the source's own, with zooms and captions re-aimed for each, exported as MP4 up to 4K at 60 fps or as a GIF.

Your microphone and system audio are mixed in the same recording, with voice cleanup in the Audio tab. If that is the part you came for, there is a guide to recording system audio and your microphone at the same time.

What OBS does that Focal does not

If any of these is what you need, OBS is the better choice, plainly.

Live streaming. Focal does not stream at all.
Scenes made of many sources, switched with transitions. Focal records one window, region or monitor, with your camera in a corner.
Game capture, through a Game Capture source on Windows. Focal has no game mode.
Mac and Linux. Focal runs on Windows 10 (version 21H2 or later) and Windows 11, 64-bit, and nothing else.
Plugins, and scripts in Lua or Python. Focal cannot be extended.
Separate audio tracks in its advanced output mode, and a lossless recording preset.
A price of nothing. Focal is paid, and no sentence I write here is going to beat free.

Recording quality and load on your computer

Both can record with your GPU's video encoder, which is why recording your screen no longer has to slow the computer down. OBS's hardware encoding guide recommends one for the best performance, because it takes the work off the CPU, and covers encoders from NVIDIA, AMD, Intel and Apple. Focal records straight into the GPU's encoder (NVIDIA, AMD or Intel) and falls back to the CPU when there is none. If you want the longer version, I wrote a note on what your GPU's video encoder does for a screen recording.

The numbers I can give you are Focal's own: an hour at 4K 60 fps with everything on used 4.8% of the CPU, 216,032 frames with none dropped, memory flat at 130 MB, measured on 2026-10-31 on an RTX 3090 with a Ryzen 9 9950X3D. Other machines differ. I have not measured OBS on that machine and its guide gives no figure, so there is none here. A blank is more honest than a guess.

What differs is when the work happens. OBS composes the whole scene as it records. Focal records only the screen and draws the zooms, cursor, captions and frame on the GPU when you export: a 4K recording exported to 1080p ran 8 times faster than real time on the same machine.

Both protect a recording from a crash. Focal has every frame on disk the moment it is written, so a power cut, whether it came from the grid or from a cat on the power strip, leaves you with what you had. OBS's recording guide recommends MKV because a recording that does not stop cleanly does not ruin the whole file, and OBS can remux it to MP4 afterwards.

Focal and OBS Studio side by side

OBS facts checked on 2026-11-02 on obsproject.com and the OBS knowledge base.

Feature	OBS Studio	Focal
Price	Free and open source	$99 once, free trial with no time limit
Platforms	Windows 10 and 11, macOS 13 or newer, Linux	Windows 10 (21H2 or later) and 11, 64-bit
Live streaming	Yes	No
What it records	Scenes of many sources	One window, region or monitor, plus camera and audio
Game capture	Yes, Windows only	No
Cursor	Captured or left out, set before recording	Recorded as data, styled after
Zoom	By hand or with community scripts, recorded live	Automatic from clicks and typing, editable after
Captions	Community plugins	Made on your computer, 26 languages
Frame	Built in the scene	Background, padding, corners, shadow, title bar
Shapes	Canvas size in video settings	16:9, 9:16, 1:1, 4:5, 21:9 or the source's own
After you stop	A video file	The editor, with zooms already made
Encoder	Hardware or software	GPU, or the CPU when there is none
Plugins and scripts	Yes	No

Who should pick which

Pick OBS Studio if you stream, want several sources in one picture, capture games, are on a Mac or Linux, or have no budget. It is the right tool for those jobs and it costs nothing. And if you know OBS well and like editing, it will make a fine demo too, with the zooms and captions done in your editor.

Pick Focal if you record software on Windows for other people to watch: product demos, tutorials, bug reports, onboarding videos, the kind of video where a quick tidy-up in an editor has a way of turning into the whole weekend. The recording comes out zoomed, with a cursor viewers can follow and captions made on your own machine, and any of it can change later. It is not a streaming tool, and it is paid: $99 once (at launch, $79 with the code LAUNCH at checkout), for one person on up to 3 computers, with every update for 12 months, and the version you have keeps working after that. There is no subscription. The pricing page has the rest.

To see whether it fits the way you work, download Focal. Recording and editing are free with every feature, for as long as you like, with no card and no account. Exporting needs a license, and until you enter a key the editor's preview shows a "Made with Focal" watermark.

Focal vs the recorders built into Windows

support@focalcapture.com (Vince) — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Windows 11 comes with two screen recorders: Xbox Game Bar, which starts with Win+Alt+R, and the Snipping Tool, which records with Win+Shift+R. Clipchamp, Microsoft's video editor, can record your screen too. All three are free, and for a quick clip of a bug, a game or a setting you want to show someone, they are the right answer. Focal, a screen recorder for Windows, is for the recording other people will watch as a demo: it zooms on what you click, smooths the cursor, writes captions and exports for YouTube or Shorts. It is free to record and edit, with no time limit, and exporting needs a license, which costs $99 once.

My name is Vince. I make Focal, so this is a man who sells a screen recorder telling you about the free ones from Microsoft, which is either very honest or very bad marketing. I have aimed for the first. If you only want the steps for each built-in tool, the guide to recording your screen on Windows 11 has them.

Xbox Game Bar: a recorder for the game or app in front of you

Game Bar is part of Windows 10 and 11, and you switch it on in Settings > Gaming > Game bar. Go to the game or app you want to record, press Win+Alt+R to start, and press Win+Alt+R again to stop. The screen flashes at the start and at the end. Win+G opens the bar itself, where the Capture widget has the same start button and the Gallery lists what you have recorded. While you record, Win+Alt+M turns the microphone on and off, and if you want every sound your computer makes, you set the audio to All under Capturing in the bar's settings. Clips are saved as MP4 in a folder called Captures inside Videos, named after the app and the date and time. Microsoft's Game Bar help is upfront about the limits: it supports one monitor at a time, and some games switch recording off, so their clips come out blank.

Game Bar also does one thing Focal does not, and it is a genuinely good trick. With background recording on, Win+Alt+G saves the last 30 seconds, or whatever length you picked, after they happened. If you want the moment you did not plan to record, Game Bar is the tool. Focal, for its part, only records what you warn it about.

The Snipping Tool's recorder: any rectangle, with sound if you want it

The Snipping Tool is the screenshot app in Windows 11, and its Record mode makes videos. It is Windows 11 only: on Windows 10 the Microsoft Store installs Snip & Sketch instead. Press Win+Shift+R, drag a rectangle over the part of the screen you want, select Start, and select Stop when you are done. The hardest decision in the whole process is where to put the corners. It can record your PC's sound and your voice from a microphone, both optional, with defaults in the app's settings and a choice of microphone if you have more than one. Recordings save themselves to a Screen Recordings folder inside Videos, which you can turn off in the settings. When you stop, Microsoft's Snipping Tool help says you can keep the recording as it is or select Edit in Clipchamp to work on it there.

Clipchamp records in a browser or its app

Clipchamp records a browser tab, a window or the whole screen, with your webcam if you want it, from the Record & create tab of its editor, as Microsoft's Clipchamp help describes. You sign up first, a recording runs up to 30 minutes, a WebM copy downloads to your computer, and the clip goes into the editor. Of the three it is the only one that is also an editor, and that matters more than it sounds, because recording is the easy half of a demo.

What the built-in recorders leave you with

Game Bar and the Snipping Tool hand you a video file of what the screen showed, at the size it showed it. For a bug report or a clip in a chat, that is exactly right. For a demo, it is where the work starts.

A button the size of a fingernail on a 27 inch monitor is a speck on a phone. If the pointer is in the clip, it is part of the picture, so its jumps and its wobble come along with it. Every pause and every "um" stays in. The file is the screen as it was: no background or frame around it, no chapters, and the shape of whatever you happened to record, which is rarely the 9:16 a Short needs.

Clipchamp takes you further, and the Snipping Tool sends you there with one button. Its pages describe trimming, splitting, changing speed and volume, and captions made automatically. What I did not find in them is anything that zooms to your clicks for you, so a zoom is something you find on the timeline and place by hand, one at a time, for every click that matters. In a demo, that tends to be all of them.

What Focal adds, in the same three steps

Focal records in the same three moves as the built-in tools: a shortcut, a choice of what to record, and stop. Then it does the editing a demo needs before you touch anything.

Press Print Screen. If another program already owns it, such as OneDrive or ShareX, Focal uses Ctrl+PrtSc and tells you, and you can set your own shortcut in Settings.
Drag a region, click a window to snap to it, or press Enter for the whole screen. A region can run across two monitors and records as one video. A countdown runs, then a small control bar shows the time with pause and stop, and Ctrl+Alt+M marks a moment.
Stop. The editor opens with zooms already made.

The real difference is in how it records. Focal leaves the cursor out of the picture and logs its position, its clicks and its shape a thousand times a second, on the same clock as the video. Because of that, everything below can change after you record, as the note on why Focal records without the cursor explains:

Zoom on what you click. Clicks and bursts of typing become zooms with a camera that eases in and out like a spring, and zooms close together join into one that pans. You choose what starts a zoom and can reshape any of them by hand. The zoom section of the home page shows it moving.
A smooth cursor. The raw mouse path becomes a steady glide with a ripple on each click, drawn sharp at any zoom, in the size you pick, fading when you stop moving.
Captions made on your computer by a speech model that runs there, in 26 languages, a phrase at a time. Correct any line, save an .srt, or export them as a track viewers can switch on.
Cutting by the transcript. Select words to cut them from the video, or cut every "um" and "uh" in one click. There are always more than you remember saying.
Sound that is ready to publish. Microphone and system audio are mixed, voice cleanup removes background noise and evens out loudness, and on Windows 11 system audio can leave out one app or record only one. The guide to recording system audio and your microphone covers the setup.
A background and a frame. Gradients, an image, or the recording blurred behind itself, with padding, rounded corners, a shadow and an optional macOS or Windows title bar.
Chapters from the moments you marked. Players can jump between them, and a click copies them as YouTube timestamps.
Exports shaped for where they go. 16:9, 9:16, 1:1, 4:5 or 21:9, with zooms and captions re-aimed for each, as MP4 up to 4K at 60 fps or as a GIF, with presets for YouTube, Shorts and Reels. The guide to vertical video from a screen recording goes through the Shorts case.

What Focal does not do: it has no cloud and no share links, so like Game Bar you get a file, kept in Videos\Focal. It cannot save the last 30 seconds after the fact. It runs on Windows only.

Built-in recorders and Focal side by side

Every fact about Game Bar, the Snipping Tool and Clipchamp in this table comes from Microsoft's and Clipchamp's own pages, checked on 2026-11-02. "None documented" means I found no such feature in their help pages, not that I proved it missing. Proving a negative about someone else's software would take their source code and a long weekend, and I have neither.

Feature	Xbox Game Bar	Snipping Tool	Clipchamp	Focal
Start	Win+Alt+R, or Win+G for the bar	Win+Shift+R	Record & create, in the editor	Print Screen, or a shortcut you set
What it records	The game or app you are in, one monitor at a time	A rectangle you drag	A tab, a window or the whole screen, with your webcam if you want, up to 30 minutes	A region, a window or a monitor, and a region across two monitors as one video
Audio	All computer sound if set under Capturing, microphone with Win+Alt+M	PC audio and microphone, both optional	Microphone, other sound depends on what you share	Microphone and system audio, mixed and cleaned up
Cursor	No settings documented	No settings documented	No settings documented	Recorded as data, smoothed and restyled after
Zoom on clicks	None documented	None documented	None documented	Automatic from clicks and typing, editable
Captions	None documented	Through Clipchamp	Automatic captions in the editor	Made on your computer, 26 languages, .srt or a switchable track
Editing	Gallery to view clips	Save as is, or Edit in Clipchamp	Timeline: trim, split, speed, volume	Zooms, cursor, cuts, transcript, styles, chapters
Output	MP4 in Videos\Captures	Saved to Videos\Screen Recordings	WebM copy, then export, up to 1080p on the free plan	MP4 up to 4K at 60 fps, or GIF, presets for YouTube, Shorts and Reels
Runs on	Windows 10 and 11	Windows 11	Browser or Windows app, with an account	Windows 10 (21H2 or later) and 11, 64-bit
Price	Part of Windows	Part of Windows 11	Free, more with Microsoft 365 Personal or Family	$99 once, free trial with no time limit

Which one should you use

Use Game Bar for games, for a clip of one app with its sound, and for the last 30 seconds you did not plan to record.

Use the Snipping Tool for a quick clip of part of the screen to drop into a bug report, an email or a chat. One shortcut, one rectangle, and the file is already in your Videos folder by the time you have opened the bug tracker.

Use Clipchamp if you want your webcam next to your screen and a general video editor at no cost, and you do not mind signing up or a 30 minute limit per recording.

Use Focal when the recording is a product demo, a tutorial, a launch video or a Short, where viewers need to see what you clicked and read what you said, and you would rather not build every zoom by hand. The free trial has every feature and no time limit, and needs no card and no account. Exporting needs a license, and until you enter a key the editor's preview shows a "Made with Focal" watermark. The price, the launch code and what a license covers are on the pricing page.

How to add captions to a screen recording without uploading it

support@focalcapture.com (Vince) — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMT

To add captions to a screen recording without uploading it, make them on your own computer. Focal, a screen recorder for Windows, does this with a speech model that runs on your computer: record with your microphone on, make captions in the editor, correct any line that came out wrong, pick a look, and export them drawn into the picture, as a track viewers can switch on, or as an .srt file. The model is downloaded once, about 190 MB, and your voice and your screen stay where they were recorded.

My name is Vince. I make Focal, and between demos and tutorials I talk to my monitor more than to most people I know. This is how I get all those words onto the video without sending them anywhere first.

Why caption a screen recording

Most social feeds start a video muted, and many people never turn the sound on. A demo without captions spends its first seconds as a silent film about a settings page. With captions, those same seconds can be read.

Captions are also how deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers follow you at all. They help anyone watching in a second language, anyone who finds your accent hard to follow, and anyone in an open office without headphones. And captions are text. Text can be searched where a voice cannot, by a site and by you, months later, looking for the one video where you explained a setting.

Screen recordings have one more reason of their own. They are full of words that are hard to hear and easy to read: function names, menu items, product names. Captions put those words on screen at the moment you say them, which is the moment the viewer needs them.

The usual ways, and what they send where

There are three common routes. Each one works, and each one has a catch.

A captioning service

You upload the video, or at least its audio, and get captions back. Some services use people, some run a speech model on their own servers. If you need captions checked by a person for a legal or broadcast requirement, a human service is the right call and worth the upload. The catch is that your voice, and usually your screen, now sit on someone else's servers under someone else's retention policy, a genre of document I have personally never read to the end. For a public launch video that may be fine. For a recording of an internal dashboard, a customer's account or code that has not shipped, it often is not.

YouTube's automatic captions

Upload the video to YouTube and it can caption it for you at no cost. If the video is going to YouTube anyway, this is a fine route and I would not talk you out of it. The catch is that the upload is the price, and the captions live in YouTube's player. If the video is headed for a help center, a pull request, a sales email or a social feed, you have put it on a platform it was never meant for just to get some text back.

Typing them by hand

A subtitle editor lets you type each line and set when it starts and ends. Nothing leaves your computer, which is the good news. The rest is a loop: play a few seconds, pause, type, set the times, and go again, for the whole video. It takes many times longer than the recording itself. I tried it once, and by the end I knew my own voice better than I ever wanted to. That loop is why so many screen recordings go out with no captions at all.

I wrote more about why the upload matters in your screen recording should stay on your computer.

How to add captions in Focal

Focal takes a fourth route. The speech model runs on your computer, so captioning needs no upload and no account. The model is downloaded the first time you make captions, and after that nothing about captioning leaves the machine. The privacy note lists the few things Focal ever sends anywhere. It is a short list, and your audio is not on it. The captions section of the home page shows the result. Here is how it goes.

Record with your microphone on. Press the recording shortcut, Print Screen by default, then drag a region, click a window or press Enter for the whole screen. In the small panel that opens next, turn the microphone on. Focal keeps that choice for next time.
Talk as you work, then stop. The editor opens with zooms already made.
Make captions. The first time, Focal downloads the speech model, about 190 MB. The captions come a phrase at a time, following your voice.
Read them through and correct any line that came out wrong, right there in the editor.
Pick a look: Clean, Subtitle, Lines, Shorts, Karaoke or Minimal. Or set your own font, weight, case and colors, with a box behind the text, a box per line, an outline, a shadow or nothing. Captions can dim the words ahead, or color or box the word being spoken, so they highlight word by word. They can show a few words at a time on one or two lines, sit at the top, middle or bottom, and fade or pop in.
Choose how they leave the editor: drawn into the picture, as a track viewers can switch on, or both. Save an .srt file for any other player or site. Then export the MP4.

Which to choose? Draw them into the picture for social feeds, where a clip gets downloaded and reposted and a separate track is easily lost along the way. Use a track for a player with a captions button, so people who do not need them can switch them off. Save the .srt when the video goes to a site that takes its own caption files.

Once you like a look, save it in a style along with your background and cursor, and set that style as the default. Every new recording then gets the same captions, and you no longer have to remember which shade of yellow you settled on last month.

How long captions take

On a computer with a dedicated GPU, captioning is quick. Measured on 2026-10-31 on my test machine, an RTX 3090 with a Ryzen 9 9950X3D, ten minutes of speech was captioned in about 14 seconds, which is shorter than some of my opening sentences. On the CPU alone, without the GPU, the same ten minutes took about 38 seconds. That is a fast desktop CPU, so expect longer on a smaller one. Other machines differ, and the first run adds the model download.

Getting names and technical terms right

General speech models do well with everyday words and badly with yours. A product name, a library, a function called useEffect: these are the words a screen recording is about, and they are exactly the words a model tends to hear as something else. Focal reads the words on your screen and gives them to the model as hints, so a term that is visible, like useEffect or the name of the product you are showing, comes out spelled the way the screen spells it.

Focal also leaves out the phrases speech models make up over typing and clapping. Give a model a few seconds of rattling keys and it can invent a sentence nobody said, with the calm confidence of someone who was not listening. Those sentences do not end up in your captions.

If a word still comes out wrong, correct that line in the editor before you export.

Captions in other languages

Focal captions 26 languages, detected from your speech or chosen by you. It can also write speech in any language out in English, which helps when you explain things best in your own language and your viewers read English. Japanese and Chinese are read without spaces, the way they are written. Languages other than English use a second model of the same size, about 190 MB, downloaded the first time you need it.

Edit the video by its transcript

Once a recording has captions, the captions list is also a way to edit. Select words in it and cut them from the video. Cut every "um" and "uh" in one click, a click that does a lot of work on my own recordings. Tighten long pauses, while the pauses where you click or type stay, so the video still shows what you did.

This is the quickest way I know to turn a first take into something worth sending: talk through the demo once, then cut the false starts by reading them. The guide to recording a product demo video on Windows covers the rest of that workflow.

Captions for vertical video

A vertical cut for Shorts, Reels or TikTok needs captions more than any other version, because it usually starts muted on a phone. Change the aspect ratio to 9:16 and Focal re-aims the zooms and the captions for it. Start from the Shorts look, and set the captions in the middle rather than at the bottom, where those apps put their own buttons and text, and they got there first. Then export with the preset for Shorts and Reels. The guide to turning a screen recording into a vertical video goes through the rest.

Captions are in the free trial with every other feature, with no time limit, no card and no account. Exporting a video needs a license, and until you enter a key the editor's preview shows a "Made with Focal" watermark. Download Focal, record two minutes with your microphone on, and make captions to see how close the first pass comes.

How to add zoom effects to a screen recording

support@focalcapture.com (Vince) — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMT

To add zoom effects to a screen recording, you either keyframe the scale and position of the video in an editor, one zoom at a time, or use a recorder that makes zooms from your clicks and typing and lets you adjust them afterward. My name is Vince, and I built Focal, a screen recorder for Windows, to do the second, mostly so that I could stop doing the first. When you stop recording, the editor opens with zooms already made, each one easing in on what you clicked, holding while you work there, and easing back out. What follows is why zooms help, what separates a good zoom from a jarring one, what doing it by hand actually involves, and how to shape the zooms Focal makes.

Why zoom a screen recording at all

A screen recording is usually made on a big monitor and watched on something much smaller. A 4K screen shrunk onto a phone turns menus into specks and body text into gray lines. Even on a laptop, a full screen recording of a settings page, playing in a browser tab, is hard to read. A zoom fixes that by filling the frame with the part that matters.

It does a second job that matters just as much: it tells the viewer where to look. A full desktop has a dozen things competing for attention, and only one of them is the point. When the frame moves in on the button you are about to press, the viewer knows what you clicked and why, and you never have to say "up in the top right corner, no, the other one". Done well, zooms are how a recording points.

What a good zoom does

The zooms people notice for the wrong reasons are the ones that look cut rather than filmed. A filmed zoom behaves like a camera held by someone who is paying attention. A cut one behaves like a camera that just heard its name. A few principles get you most of the way, and each one comes with a matching mistake.

Ease in, hold, ease out. The camera speeds up gently, slows as it arrives, stays put while you work, and leaves the same way. A zoom that jumps to full size in one frame reads as a cut, and a zoom at a constant speed looks mechanical.
Pan between nearby targets. Click a field and then a button just below it, and the camera should stay in and slide across, not back out and come in again. Pumping in and out between two nearby clicks is the most common mistake I see, and it is tiring to watch.
Do not zoom on every click. Some clicks are housekeeping, like focusing a window or closing a tooltip. Zoom on those and the important ones start to look less important.
Let it rest during scrolling. Scrolling a zoomed page moves everything at once and loses the viewer. Stay out while the page moves, and zoom again when you stop and act.
Wait for the action. A camera that drifts toward the next target before you click gives away what is coming and leaves the current target half framed. Move when the hand moves.
Blur the motion a little. A real camera blurs what moves fast. A little motion blur during a zoom or a pan makes the movement read as one smooth motion instead of a series of sharp frames.
Do not zoom too far. The viewer should still know which part of the screen they are looking at. Go in far enough to read, and stop before the context disappears.

Zooming by hand in a video editor

Any editor with keyframes can do this, and the recipe is always the same. You put the recording on the timeline and, for each zoom, set a keyframe for scale and position where the zoom starts, another where it reaches full size, another where the hold ends, and a last one where it is back out. Then you set the easing on each keyframe so the motion is not linear, and check that the position you chose keeps the target in frame at that scale. A pan is two more keyframes on position while the scale stays the same. Motion blur is a separate effect, if your editor has one.

That is four keyframes and some easing per zoom. A demo with thirty clicks worth showing comes to over a hundred keyframes, and if you trim a section later, every keyframe after it may need moving. There is a second problem: most recorders draw the cursor into the video, so when you scale the picture up, the cursor scales with it and goes soft. I wrote about that choice in why Focal records your screen without the cursor.

Doing it by hand gives you complete control, and for one short clip it is fine. As a habit for every demo, it is the step people quietly stop doing, usually somewhere around the third one, and the recordings go back to being hard to read.

How Focal makes zooms automatically

Focal records the screen without the cursor in it. The cursor's position, clicks and shape are logged as data, a thousand times a second, on the same clock as the video, and so are key timings. That record is what the zooms are made from, and it is why every one of them can be changed after recording.

When you stop, the editor opens with zooms already in place:

Clicks and bursts of typing become zooms, with a camera that eases in and out like a spring.
Zooms close together join into one that pans from one target to the next, instead of backing out between them.
The camera waits for each click rather than drifting toward the next one.
Clicks on Focal's own control bar never cause a zoom. Your viewers came to see your app, not mine.

You choose what starts a zoom in the Zoom tab, under Make zooms for me: clicks, right clicks, other buttons, typing, shortcuts or scrolling. To begin with, clicks, right clicks and typing are on and the other three are off, so scrolling never starts a zoom unless you ask it to, and the camera rests while a page moves. You can see the zooms in motion on the home page.

Shaping a zoom in Focal

Automatic zooms are a starting point, not a verdict. Every one can be changed, and you can add your own.

Adding and moving zooms

Drag on the zoom lane, or press Z, to add a zoom. Press K to add a keyframe inside a zoom. From there the zoom can move its focus or change its level, and you choose whether it eases, glides or jumps to the new framing. To choose what a zoom looks at, click that spot in the video. If the thing you want to show moves, such as a drag or a drawing, let the zoom follow the cursor instead of holding on one point. Zooms split, trim and nudge on the timeline the way clips do.

Level, hold and speed

Each zoom has its own level, which is how far in it goes, and its own hold time. Speed has three settings, Slow, Smooth and Snappy, for all zooms at once or for one. My habit is to pick one for the whole video, then change single zooms where a moment needs more time or less. The zoom feel is part of a style, so once you find a look you like, it can be saved by name and set as the default for new recordings.

Motion blur on zooms and pans

Motion blur is on by default for zooms, pans and fast cursor moves, and its amount is in the Zoom tab. Turn it down if you want frames that stay crisp when someone pauses the video, and someone always pauses the video. Turn it up if the motion still looks steppy.

When you change the settings

Changing the zoom settings updates the automatic zooms at once, so you can try a different speed or a different set of triggers and watch the whole video change. Zooms you edited or deleted stay as you left them. That means you can fix the three zooms that matter by hand and still change your mind about the rest. The preview is drawn by the same renderer as the export, so the zooms you watch in the editor are the zooms in the file.

Zooms in a vertical video

A 9:16 frame shows a narrow slice of a wide screen. Fit the whole desktop into a tall frame and it becomes a thin strip with empty space above and below, which is a lot of phone for not much app. Crop it instead and a zoom that framed a toolbar in 16:9 may miss half of it. In a vertical video the zoom has more to do: it has to aim at the action, not only enlarge it.

Focal's aspect ratios are 16:9, 9:16, 1:1, 4:5, 21:9 and Source, and changing the aspect ratio re-aims the zooms and captions for the new frame. The same project gives you a wide video for YouTube and a tall one for Shorts or Reels, and you can check the tall one in the preview before you export. The whole process is in how to turn a screen recording into a vertical video.

If the recording is a product demo, how to record a product demo video on Windows covers the rest of the setup. Focal is free to record and edit with every feature, with no time limit, no card and no account, and exporting needs a license. Download the trial, record something with a few clicks in it, and see what the zooms do.

How to make a GIF of your screen on Windows

support@focalcapture.com (Vince) — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMT

To make a GIF of your screen on Windows, record a small region for a few seconds, cut it down to one action, and export it at a low frame rate. ScreenToGif, ShareX and LICEcap all do this for free. Focal, a screen recorder for Windows, does it with zooms and a smooth cursor that keep a small GIF readable, and it exports the same recording as an MP4 when a video would serve better.

My name is Vince. I make Focal, and I have watched four-second loops of my own app more times than any person should. If all that watching taught me one thing, it is that a good GIF is mostly decided before you press record.

When a GIF is the right format, and when it is not

A GIF plays by itself, anywhere an image shows, with no play button. That is the whole case for it. Put one in a README, a pull request, a Slack or Teams message or a docs page, and the reader sees the thing happen as they scroll past. A video in the same place often waits for a click, and a play button is a polite request that plenty of people decline.

It is the wrong format for anything longer than about ten seconds, anything with speech, and anything where color matters. Each frame holds at most 256 colors, there is no sound at all, and the file grows with every frame, because GIF compression is old and weak next to a modern video codec. Save a thirty-second walkthrough as a GIF and you get a big file that still looks worse than the video.

GIF or MP4

What you get	GIF	MP4 (H.264)
Plays without a click	Anywhere images show	Only where the site plays video inline
Sound	None	Yes
Colors	256 per frame	Full color
File size for the same clip	Larger, often by a lot	Smaller
Comfortable length	A few seconds	Any length

The rule I use, which has settled every format argument I have ever had with myself: if the place you are posting plays video inline, send an MP4. If it only shows images, or the point is that it moves before anyone touches it, send a GIF and keep it short.

Free tools for a GIF on Windows

These are the three free tools most people reach for. I checked each one, and the GitHub limits further down, on their own sites on 2026-11-02.

ScreenToGif records a region of the screen, a webcam or a sketchboard, opens the recording in an editor, and saves it as a GIF, an APNG, a video or images. It is open source under the Microsoft Public License, with its code on GitHub. Its old address now leads to N-Studio, the same developer's successor app, which has a free tier and a paid Professional one. ScreenToGif itself is still offered there as the legacy version and was last updated on 2026-07-28.
ShareX is a free, open source screenshot tool for Windows, and screen recording to a video or straight to a GIF are among its capture methods. It does far more than GIFs, so expect more settings on the way to your first one.
LICEcap from Cockos is GPL free software for Windows and macOS. It records a frame on your desktop straight to a GIF, lets you move the frame and pause while recording, and caps the frame rate. The last release is v1.32 from June 2022. Some software is abandoned and some is simply finished, and LICEcap still does its one job like the second kind.

If you want to fix a GIF frame by frame, ScreenToGif's editor is made for exactly that.

What makes a GIF small and readable

The same rules hold in every tool, roughly in order of how much they save. Most of them come down to showing less, which is harder than it sounds when the whole screen is your work and you are fond of all of it.

Record a small region. File size follows pixel count. A region around the one panel that matters is a fraction of a full screen, and the text in it stays at its real size.
Keep it short. Two to eight seconds. Every frame is stored, so length is size.
Show one action. One click, one menu, one result. If it takes three steps, make three GIFs or make a video.
Loop cleanly. End on the screen you started on and trim the pause at each end, so the loop reads as one motion and not as a jump.
Lower the frame rate. An interface reads fine at 10 to 15 frames a second. A GIF at 60 fps stores four times the frames of one at 15, for motion nobody needs.
Use fewer colors. Flat interfaces need far fewer than 256. Gradients, shadows, photos and blurred backgrounds are what cost colors, and they are what bands. Dithering hides banding with noise, and the noise makes the file bigger.
Shrink the pixel size last. Scaling a frame down blurs text. Record smaller in the first place, and shrink only when the file is still too big.

Making one with Focal, step by step

Focal records the screen without the cursor and keeps the cursor's path, clicks and key timings as data. So what the GIF shows is decided after recording, at your desk, and not while you are busy doing the thing. The guide to recording your screen without the cursor explains why that helps.

Pick the region. Press Print Screen, then click a window to snap to it, or drag a region around the part that matters. If ShareX or another program already owns Print Screen, Focal uses Ctrl+PrtSc and tells you. The smallest recording is 256 x 144. Leave the microphone and system audio off, since a GIF cannot carry them. If the GIF shows a keyboard shortcut, set keystrokes to Shortcuts to show it as a pill on the video.
Do the one action. After a countdown, a small control bar shows the time with pause and stop. Clicks on the bar never cause a zoom, so stopping does not leave a stray zoom at the end.
Trim on the timeline. The editor opens when you stop, with zooms already made from your clicks. Trim the start and the end, split out a wait in the middle, or speed up a clip that drags. Or leave the recording whole and press I and O around the moment you want: the export takes only that part.
Let the zooms do the reading. A zoom on the click lets a small GIF show small text at a size people can read. Delete the zooms you do not need, or press Z to add one. The camera eases in and out like a spring, so the GIF still reads as one motion. The guide to zoom effects covers shaping them by hand.
Check the cursor. The raw mouse path becomes a steady glide with a ripple on each click, which matters in a GIF because nothing else tells the viewer a click happened. The standard cursors are drawn as vectors, so they stay sharp inside a zoom, and the cursor fades when idle.
Keep the look plain. Background, padding, corners and shadow live in Styles. For a GIF, a little padding and no busy background leave more of the 256 colors for the interface itself, which is the part anyone came to see.
Export. Export with the GIF preset. When the place you are posting plays video inline, export the same recording as an MP4 with H.264 instead, up to 4K at 60 fps. You can save presets of your own beside it. The formats are listed in the exports section of the home page.

Exporting, a GIF included, needs a license. Recording and editing are free with every feature and no time limit, and until you enter a key the editor's preview shows a "Made with Focal" watermark. You can download the trial with no card and no account.

For a three-second loop of one toggle, any of the free tools above is quicker to open than Focal, and I say that as the person who would very much like you to open Focal. Focal earns its place when the GIF has to be read: small text, a click that has to be seen, or a step that needs a zoom to make sense.

Using it in a README or a pull request

A GIF at the top of a README shows what a project does before anyone reads a word. One in a pull request shows the change working, which makes a stronger case than "works on my machine" ever has. GitHub takes GIFs up to 10 MB in issues, pull requests and comments, and videos too, 10 MB on a free plan and 100 MB on a paid one, with H.264 recommended. The guide to screen recordings for READMEs, pull requests and bug reports goes further into both.

How to record a coding tutorial on Windows

support@focalcapture.com (Vince) — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMT

To record a coding tutorial on Windows, make the code big enough to read on a phone, clear the screen of everything you are not using, and say what you are about to do before you do it. Then let the recorder do the tedious parts: show your shortcuts, caption your voice with the identifiers spelled right, and cut the pauses where you stopped to think. My name is Vince. I make Focal, a screen recorder for Windows, and more than once I have recorded myself typing a bug live while explaining, with complete confidence, why it worked. This guide is what those takes taught me, with Focal as the worked example. The setup half works with any recorder.

Set up the editor and terminal

Most of what makes a coding video watchable is decided before you press record. Your viewer sees your monitor shrunk to a phone held sideways, after compression has been hard on every thin line of text. At the font size you code at every day, your code reaches them as a soft grey texture.

Raise the editor font size. Far past what you code at. Visual Studio Code, JetBrains IDEs and Cursor all let you set it. Around 18 to 22 is a good start for a 1080p video, about twice that on a 4K monitor at 100% scaling. Watch ten seconds of test footage on your phone before the real take.
Pick a theme with contrast. Dark or light both work. Grey comments and dim line numbers are the first things compression smears.
Hide the sidebars you are not using. Every column a file tree or a panel takes is a column the code does not get.
Give the terminal the same font. Same family, a similar size, colors close to the editor theme, so a cut to the terminal does not look like it happened on someone else's computer.
Close the notifications. Turn on Do not disturb in Windows 11 (Focus assist in Windows 10) and quit chat and mail. A message preview over your code is hard to cut out cleanly.
Close what you would not show. Files with keys in them, a terminal with tokens in its scrollback, browser tabs with customer data. Start from a fresh terminal.

Window or the whole screen

Record the window when the whole tutorial happens in one app. In Focal you press the shortcut and click the window to snap to it, and the recording can leave out the app's own title bar, which Focal remembers per app. Two things to know: Windows 10 draws a yellow border around a recorded window that only Windows 11 can hide, and a window recording stops by itself, keeping what it has, if that window closes.

Record the whole screen (press Enter) or drag a region when you move between the editor, a terminal and a browser. A region can even span two monitors and record as one video, for anyone whose terminal lives on the other screen.

Mind the size. A whole 4K monitor exported at 1080p shows your text at half the size you see it. Raise the font further, or drag a region of about 1920 x 1080 around the part you use so the export is pixel for pixel. Zooms help, but they are no excuse for small code.

Record it

Narrate what you are about to do, not what you just did. Saying "now I'll handle the empty list" before you type it lets the viewer read along. Describing it afterwards leaves your voice a step behind the screen. Silence while you type is fine: editing deals with it.

Keep a take per section. For a course that usually means one recording per lesson. In one long recording, pause between sections with the control bar. When a section goes wrong, restart that section rather than the video, and cut the bad take later.

In Focal, press Print Screen. If another program owns that key, such as OneDrive or ShareX, Focal uses Ctrl+PrtSc and says so. Click the window or press Enter for the whole screen. A small panel sets the microphone, system audio, camera and keystrokes before each recording. Your choices are kept for next time, except Everything for keystrokes. After a countdown, a small control bar shows the time with pause and stop, and clicks on it never cause a zoom, so pausing does not earn a dramatic close-up of the pause button.

If your monitor runs in HDR, Focal captures it in full and converts it to SDR, so your theme looks in the video the way it looks to you.

When the terminal runs as administrator

A window run as administrator hides its clicks and keys from Focal unless Focal also runs as administrator. With an elevated terminal the video still shows it, but that stretch gets no click or typing zooms and no shortcut pills. Focal warns before recording such a window, and the editor marks the stretch so you know why. Run the terminal normally unless the tutorial really needs elevation, and when it does, start Focal as administrator for that recording.

Show your keystrokes

Viewers cannot see your hands. When a shortcut opens a panel or jumps to another file, the screen changes for no visible reason. To the viewer, F12 is a magic trick.

Focal's Keystrokes setting is Off by default. Set it to Shortcuts before you record, and key combinations such as Ctrl+Shift+P, Ctrl+D or F12 show as a pill at the bottom or top of the video. The pills are timed with your cuts and speed changes. Ordinary typing is left out, which is right for code, since the editor already shows it.

There is also Everything, which shows all typing. For code I would leave it alone. It adds nothing the editor does not show, and the recording's input log then keeps everything you typed, passwords included, which is why Focal warns before such a project is exported or shared.

Captions that spell code right

Many people watch tutorials with the sound off, and anyone who hears "use effect" wants to read useEffect, not "used affect", which is a mood rather than a hook. Focal makes captions on your computer with a speech model that runs there, about 190 MB, downloaded the first time. It reads the words on screen as hints, so names like useEffect come out spelled as in your code when they are visible. It also leaves out the phrases speech models tend to make up over the sound of typing. When a line is still wrong, correct it in the editor.

Draw the captions into the picture, export them as a track viewers can switch on, or save an .srt to upload with the video. The captions section on the home page shows the looks, and how to add captions to a screen recording covers the rest.

Zooms on typing and clicks

When you stop, the editor opens with zooms already made from your clicks and bursts of typing. Type into a function and the camera moves in on it. Zooms close together join into one that pans, so a run of edits down a file reads as one move rather than a camera that cannot make up its mind.

You choose what starts a zoom in the Zoom tab: clicks, right clicks, other buttons, typing, shortcuts and scrolling. If you scroll through long files, leave scrolling out. Changing these updates the automatic zooms at once, and zooms you edited or deleted stay that way. Press Z to add one by hand, and see how to add zoom effects to a screen recording for more.

Edit out the thinking

Every coding session has silences where you read an error or decide what to name something. On video they feel twice as long. Naming a variable, it turns out, takes just as long with an audience.

Focal edits by the transcript. Tighten long pauses and the silences shrink, but pauses where you click or type stay, so the typing remains while the staring goes. Cut every "um" and "uh" in one click. Select a false start in the captions list and cut it from the video like text.

For typing that runs long, split the clip on the timeline and speed it up. Your voice keeps its normal pitch. Voice cleanup, two switches in the Audio tab, removes background noise and evens out loudness to the level web video is mixed at.

Chapters for every section

Press Ctrl+Alt+M at the start of each section while you record. Markers become chapters. The exported file carries them, so video players can jump between them, and a click copies them as YouTube timestamps for the description, which beats scrubbing back through your own video with a notepad. A style can also show chapter titles on screen.

Your camera, out of the way of the code

For a YouTube tutorial or a course, a face in the corner helps people stay. Switch the camera on before you record. In Focal it shows as a circle, a rounded square, or a wide or tall rectangle, in sync with your voice. Size it and drag it anywhere in the preview, usually to the right, where lines of code rarely reach. While you record, a live bubble shows you the camera and never appears in the recording. The camera section shows the shapes.

Captions and the shortcut pill both want the bottom edge, and neither is good at sharing. Put one at the top.

Export for YouTube, a course or your team

Export MP4 at 1080p and 60 fps with the YouTube preset. Sixty frames a second keeps scrolling and the cursor smooth. If you recorded a 4K monitor, pick 4K under Size: the upload is longer, and small text stays sharper after YouTube compresses it. Focal exports H.264 or HEVC up to 4K at 60 fps. H.264 plays everywhere, so use it for a course platform or a team drive.

A short clip in a pull request is a different job, for a smaller audience with stronger opinions, covered in screen recordings for READMEs and pull requests.

Focal is free to record and edit with every feature, no time limit and no account, and exporting needs a license. Download the trial, set Keystrokes to Shortcuts, and record one section first.

How to record system audio and your microphone together on Windows

support@focalcapture.com (Vince) — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMT

You can record the sound your computer plays and your own voice at the same time on Windows, with no cable, no second device and no Stereo Mix. Windows lets a recording app take the sound going to your speakers or headphones directly, and the recorders that come with Windows use it: Xbox Game Bar has a setting for it, and the Snipping Tool can add PC audio and a microphone voice-over. OBS Studio records the two as separate sources and can keep them on separate tracks. Focal, a screen recorder for Windows, sets your microphone and system audio in a small panel before each recording, keeps your choices for next time, and corrects your microphone's delay so your voice lines up with the picture.

My name is Vince. I make Focal, and I have narrated more than one perfect demo to a microphone that was not recording, so this one is personal. It is also why Focal now tells you when Windows has your microphone muted. Everything below about Windows' own tools and OBS Studio comes from Microsoft's and the OBS Project's own pages, checked on 2026-11-02.

What system audio is, and why Stereo Mix is not the answer any more

System audio is everything your computer plays: a video in the browser, the sound of the app you are demoing, the other people on a call, a notification chime. People also call it internal audio, desktop audio or computer audio. Whatever the name, it is the same thing.

For years the advice was Stereo Mix, a recording device some sound drivers add that hands whatever the sound card plays to any app as if it were a microphone. Where it exists it is usually disabled and hidden, it depends on your sound driver, and plenty of computers do not have it at all. If you have ever spent an evening following an old forum thread to a device your computer does not have, that was Stereo Mix. It also takes everything the sound card plays, with no way to leave one app out.

The good news is that you do not need it. Every recorder in this guide asks Windows for the sound going to your output device directly.

Xbox Game Bar: one setting called All

Game Bar comes with Windows 10 and 11. Press Windows key + G to open it, or Windows key + Alt + R to start and stop a recording without opening it. It records the game or app you are in.

Which audio it records is a setting. Microsoft's page on Game Bar capture settings lists three choices under Audio to record: Game only, All, which takes your mic, background music and system sounds, and None, which leaves out game and system audio but still records your mic. For system audio and your voice together, the one you want is All. Windows Settings > Gaming > Captures has matching switches for recording audio with a clip, a choice of audio quality, and sliders for the system and mic levels while you record. Windows key + Alt + M turns the microphone on and off during a recording.

Game Bar's Audio widget has two parts. Mix picks your output speakers and shows a volume level for each running app, which you can turn up or down. Voice sets the default input microphone and lets you test it with visual feedback. Microsoft's page suggests making volume adjustments right in Game Bar, and Mix is where you do that when one app drowns out your voice. Game Bar is built around games, which the name makes no effort to hide. For what it can and cannot record outside them, see every built-in way to record your screen on Windows 11.

Snipping Tool: PC audio and a voice-over

On Windows 11 the Snipping Tool records video. Press Windows key + Shift + R, or open it and select Record, then New, drag a rectangle over the part of the screen you want, then select Start. Since version 11.2307.44.0, Microsoft's Windows Insider announcement says it can optionally record your PC audio and a voice-over from your microphone. Its settings choose whether new recordings include audio by default, and if you have more than one microphone you can pick one before you start. When you stop, you can save the clip as it is or open it in Clipchamp.

It is the lightest way to get a clip with both sounds in it, and I mean that as a compliment. If you see no audio options, check the app's version against that number.

OBS Studio: separate tracks

OBS Studio captures your desktop audio and your microphone by default, and its Audio Mixer shows a meter for each, Desktop Audio and Mic/Aux. If a meter does not move, or the wrong device is picked, choose the devices yourself in Settings > Audio.

What OBS does that the built-in tools do not is keep the sources apart. In Advanced output mode it can record up to six audio tracks: open Advanced Audio Properties from the Audio Mixer, give each source its own track, then enable those tracks in Settings > Output. Its knowledge base recommends MKV for this, since not every container holds more than one audio track, and warns that standard video players play only one audio track at a time. If the file goes straight to viewers without an editor, put everything on track 1 as well. Otherwise a viewer may get the app's sound and none of your voice, and assume that was the plan. For one app's sound on its own, OBS Studio 28 and later has an Application Audio Capture (BETA) source.

If you need your voice and the app's sound as separate tracks for a video editor, OBS Studio is the better tool, and Focal does not do that. OBS is also a broadcasting tool with scenes and sources to set up first. I compare the two for demo videos in Focal vs OBS Studio.

Recording system audio and your microphone with Focal

I built Focal for recordings that get published, so the sound is something you set up once and then stop thinking about:

Install Focal from the download page. Recording and editing are free with every feature, with no time limit, no card and no account, and exporting needs a license.
Press Print Screen. If another program owns that key, Focal uses Ctrl+PrtSc and tells you.
Drag a region, click a window to snap to it, or press Enter for the whole screen.
A small panel sets the microphone, system audio, camera and keystrokes before each recording. Your choices are kept for next time, except Everything for keystrokes. If Windows has the microphone muted, the panel says so before you start.
On Windows 11, you can record the system audio of one app only, or of everything except one app. Recording only the app you are demoing keeps a chat notification or a music player out of the video.
A countdown runs, then a small control bar shows the time, with pause and stop, and whether the microphone and system audio are recording. A level bar beside the microphone rises as you speak, so one that hears nothing shows in the first seconds rather than at the end. The microphone and speaker on the bar are buttons too: click the microphone to mute it through a sneeze or a doorbell, and the speaker to mute system audio when a chat app picks that moment to ping; click again to bring either back. The muted stretch is recorded as silence, so the sound stays in sync. Stop, and the editor opens.

Focal mixes the microphone and system audio sample for sample. When both are loud at the same moment, it limits them softly instead of letting the peak clip into distortion.

In the editor, voice cleanup, two switches in the Audio tab, removes background noise and evens out loudness to the level web video is mixed at. The same tab has change pitch and mute, and you can add background music that gets quieter while you talk. Clips you speed up or slow down on the timeline keep your voice at its normal pitch, so speeding through the slow part does not turn you into a chipmunk. Focal runs on Windows 10 version 21H2 or later, and only the one-app options need Windows 11.

Getting the voice to line up and sound clean

Every microphone hands over its sound a little after you speak, and the delay is not the same for a USB microphone, a headset and a webcam. You notice it most when your camera is on and your lips move before the words arrive. Focal measures each microphone's delay while you record and corrects it, so voice and picture line up, which is what keeps the camera bubble in sync with what you say.

Audio interfaces bring their own trap. Many show up in Windows as one two-channel device, with your microphone on input 1 and nothing on input 2. A recorder that averages the two gives the silence an equal say and puts your voice at half its level. Focal records the input the microphone is on instead.

The rest applies to any recorder:

Wear headphones. With speakers, the microphone picks up the system audio a moment late and the recording gets an echo. Headphones keep the two sounds apart.
Check the level before you record. In Windows 11, Settings > System > Sound > Input has Start test: speak normally, stop the test, play it back, and move the Input volume slider if needed. Then record ten seconds in your recorder and listen before the real take.
Pick the right input device. A webcam, a monitor and a headset can each add a microphone, and the default is not always the one in front of you. Check the name in Sound settings and in your recorder.
Watch for the meeting app that takes the microphone. A meeting app left open can hold the microphone, mute it or change its level. Close it before you record. If the microphone goes silent only while one app is running, open More sound settings, then the Recording tab, your microphone's Properties and Advanced, and clear the box that allows applications to take exclusive control of the device.

A good voice track is most of what makes a screen recording watchable. For the rest of the job, from the script to the export, see how to record a product demo video on Windows.

How to record your screen on Windows 11, and when you need more

support@focalcapture.com (Vince) — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Windows 11 has two screen recorders built in. Snipping Tool records any rectangle you drag, the whole screen included: press Windows+Shift+R. Xbox Game Bar records the game or app you are in: press Windows+Alt+R. Use Snipping Tool for a quick clip of a page or a bug, and Game Bar for games. Clipchamp and PowerPoint can record too. All of them save the screen as it looked, so a demo that should look edited, with zooms on your clicks and captions, needs more. My name is Vince, and I make Focal, a screen recorder for Windows, which makes me about as impartial on this subject as a parent at a school play. So Focal waits its turn at the end, and the free ways go first.

How to record your screen with Xbox Game Bar

Game Bar is the gaming overlay built into Windows 11. Despite the name, it records apps as well as games, and it is the quickest start of the lot, since all it needs is a shortcut.

Make sure it is on. Open Settings with Windows+I, search for "xbox" and turn on Enable Xbox Game Bar.
For the computer's sound, press Windows+G, open Settings in Game Bar, go to Capturing and choose All.
Open the game or app you want to record.
Press Windows+Alt+R. The screen flashes to show that recording has started.
Press Windows+Alt+M to turn your microphone on or off while you record.
Press Windows+Alt+R again to stop.

If you would rather click than remember shortcuts, press Windows+G and choose Widget menu, Capture, Start recording. The same widget has Record last (Windows+Alt+G), which saves the moments that just happened when background recording is on, and Settings > Gaming > Captures sets how much it keeps. It is the answer to the bug that only appears when you are not trying to record it, which in my experience is every bug. Focal has nothing like it.

Recordings go to the Captures folder inside Videos, as MP4 files named after the app with the date and time, and Game Bar's Gallery lists them. Microsoft's Game Bar capture page has the rest of the details.

What Game Bar will and will not record

Microsoft describes Game Bar as capture for apps and games, with these limits:

It works on one monitor at a time.
Some games switch recording off, and their clips come out blank. Protected video cannot be recorded either.
Recording clips needs a video card with one of the hardware video encoders Microsoft lists, from Intel, NVIDIA or AMD. Screenshots should work on any PC.
When a window will not record, Microsoft's own advice is to try Snipping Tool instead.
Microsoft gives no maximum length for a recording, so I will not guess one.

How to record your screen with Snipping Tool

Snipping Tool is the screenshot app in Windows 11, which undersells it. Its Record mode is the closest thing Windows has to a general screen recorder: a rectangle of any part of the screen, up to all of it.

Press Windows+Shift+R. Or open Snipping Tool, select Record, then New.
Drag a rectangle over what you want to record. For the whole desktop, drag it from one corner of the screen to the other.
Check the sound. Since version 11.2307.44.0, released in 2023, Snipping Tool can record your PC's audio and your microphone, both optional. Its settings hold the defaults, and with several microphones you pick one before you start.
Select Start.
Select Stop when you are done.

Then save it as it is, or choose Edit in Clipchamp to trim it, change its volume or add captions with Transcribe media. Microsoft's Windows 11 guide says recordings save to your Videos folder by default. The recorder is Windows 11 only: Microsoft's Snipping Tool instructions for Windows 10 have no video section.

Other ways to record that come from Microsoft

Two more recorders come with Microsoft apps you may already use, one in a video editor and one in a presentation app.

Recording in Clipchamp

Clipchamp, the video editor Snipping Tool opens, has its own recorder, and its free personal plan includes recording the screen, a webcam or both.

Open the record & create tab on the toolbar and choose screen, or screen & camera.
The first time, allow access to your camera and microphone.
Pick your microphone, then select the red button.
Choose a browser tab, a window or the entire screen, then select Share.
Select Stop sharing when you are done.

Two limits from Microsoft's Clipchamp page: with a personal account, the computer's sound records only when you share a browser tab with the audio sharing toggle on, and in the Clipchamp Windows app those tabs are Microsoft Edge tabs. A recording also has a maximum time, shown next to the elapsed time, so at least you can see the end coming. A WebM copy downloads to your computer, and the export button saves the edited video as an MP4.

Recording in PowerPoint

If what you record belongs in a presentation, PowerPoint records the screen straight onto a slide. It works in PowerPoint for Microsoft 365, 2024, 2021, 2019 and 2016.

Open the slide, then on the Insert tab select Screen Recording.
Choose Select Area, or press Windows+Shift+E, and drag over what you want. Windows+Shift+B selects the entire screen. The smallest area is 64 x 64 pixels.
Audio and the pointer record by default. Deselect Audio or Record Pointer to leave either out.
Select Record. Windows+Shift+D pauses and Windows+Shift+Q stops.

The video lands on the slide, which is exactly right if you are building a deck and a small surprise if you only wanted a file. Right-click it and choose Save Media as to keep a file, or Trim to shorten it.

What the built-in recorders leave out

For a quick clip of a bug or a setting, any of these is enough, and Snipping Tool is the one I would reach for. Nobody needs a cinematic zoom in a video called "the button does nothing". The gaps show up when the video is for other people: a product demo, a tutorial, a launch video.

They record what you aimed them at before you started. Game Bar records the app you are in, one monitor at a time. Snipping Tool and PowerPoint record the rectangle you drew.
The cursor is part of the picture. Like most recorders, they save finished pixels, so the cursor stays the size Windows drew it and moves the way your hand did. PowerPoint's Record Pointer switch is the only cursor control in Microsoft's instructions. More on that in why Focal records without the cursor.
Nothing zooms. Microsoft's recording pages say nothing about zooming in on what you click, so text recorded on a large monitor stays small on a phone.
Editing happens elsewhere, after the fact. Clipchamp is a real editor, with splitting, automatic captions and a tool that removes pauses, and a good one for free. It still starts from the same finished pixels.
Sound needs care. Clipchamp records the computer's sound only from a browser tab, and Game Bar needs Capturing set to All to include every computer sound. Your voice and the computer's sound together, in sync, has its own guide: recording system audio and your microphone on Windows.

I go through the differences in more detail in Focal vs the recorders built into Windows.

When you need more: recording with Focal

I built Focal because the recorder I wanted for demo videos did not exist on Windows. It records the screen without the cursor in it and logs the cursor, clicks and keys as data, so the editor can make zooms, smooth the cursor and place captions after you stop. Building your own recorder is the long way to get one, and I can vouch for the long part. The short way is seven steps.

Download the 9 MB installer from the download page and run it. It installs in about a second, with no administrator prompt. The installer is not code-signed yet, so Windows may show "Windows protected your PC": choose More info, then Run anyway. Focal then sits in the system tray.
Press Print Screen. If another program already owns that key, Focal uses Ctrl+PrtSc and tells you, and you can set your own shortcut in Settings.
Choose what to record: drag a region, click a window to snap to it, or press Enter for the whole screen. A region can stretch across two monitors and records as one video.
A small panel sets the microphone, system audio, camera and keystrokes before each recording. Your choices are kept for next time, except Everything for keystrokes.
After a countdown, a small control bar shows the time with pause and stop. Ctrl+Alt+M marks a moment, and markers become chapters.
Stop. The editor opens with zooms already made from your clicks and typing, easing in and out like a camera on a spring. Change what starts a zoom in the Zoom tab, or press Z to add one yourself.
Export an MP4 up to 4K at 60 fps, or a GIF, with presets for YouTube, Shorts and Reels.

What that adds over the built-in recorders

Zooms that follow your clicks, which you can reshape, move or delete.
A cursor that glides instead of jittering, with a ripple on each click, at any size and sharp at any zoom, because it is drawn after recording rather than baked in.
Captions made on your computer by a speech model that runs there, in 26 languages, and editing by the transcript: select words to cut them, or cut every "um" and "uh" in one click. My own count was humbling.
Microphone and system audio mixed into one track, with voice cleanup that removes background noise. Focal measures your microphone's delay and corrects it, so your voice lines up with the picture.
Recording on your GPU's video encoder: an hour at 4K 60 fps used 4.8% of the CPU, measured on 2026-10-31 on an RTX 3090 with a Ryzen 9 9950X3D. Other machines differ.

For a demo from first take to export, see how to record a product demo video on Windows.

What Focal does not do

Focal runs on Windows 10 (21H2 or later) and Windows 11 only, with no Mac, Linux or phone version. It has no cloud and no share links, and it does not put a recording on a slide the way PowerPoint does. Recordings, edits and captions stay on your computer.

What Focal costs

Focal is free to record and edit, with every feature, no time limit, no card and no account. Exporting needs a license, and until you enter a key the editor's preview shows a "Made with Focal" watermark. A license is $99 once, for one person on up to 3 computers, with no subscription, so there is nothing to remember to cancel.

The options side by side

Checked on 2026-11-02 against Microsoft's support pages.

Option	What it records	Audio	Cursor	Editing	Price
Xbox Game Bar	The game or app you are in, one monitor at a time	Microphone, computer sound with Capturing set to All	Not stated by Microsoft	Gallery to view clips	Built into Windows
Snipping Tool	A rectangle you drag, up to the whole screen	PC audio and microphone, both optional	Not stated by Microsoft	Edit in Clipchamp	Part of Windows 11
Clipchamp	A browser tab, a window or the entire screen	Microphone, computer sound from a browser tab	Not stated by Microsoft	A full editor with trimming, splitting and automatic captions	Free personal plan, premium features with Microsoft 365 Personal or Family
PowerPoint	An area of 64 x 64 pixels or more, or the entire screen	Audio, on by default	Recorded by default, Record Pointer turns it off	Trim, on the slide	Part of PowerPoint for Microsoft 365 and 2016 to 2024
Focal	A region, a window or a whole monitor, or a region across two monitors	Microphone and system audio, mixed	Recorded as data, changed after recording	Editor opens with zooms made, plus cursor, captions and cuts	$99 once, free trial with no time limit

If the video is only for you, Snipping Tool is already on your PC, and it does the job well. If it is for an audience, try Focal on the next one and see whether the preview looks like someone spent an evening editing it.

How to record your screen without the cursor on Windows

support@focalcapture.com (Vince) — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMT

To record your screen without the cursor on Windows, switch the cursor off in your recorder before you press record. Xbox Game Bar has an option for it in Windows Settings under Gaming > Captures, and OBS Studio has a Capture Cursor checkbox on its Display Capture and Window Capture sources. The Snipping Tool documents no such option. The other way is Focal, a screen recorder for Windows. It always records the screen without the cursor and keeps the cursor as data, so you decide after recording whether it appears at all, and what it looks like when it does.

My name is Vince. I make Focal, which means I have spent more evenings thinking about the mouse cursor than I would like to admit in public. The other recorders come first below, because one of them may be all you need. Mine comes after them, and you are welcome to stop reading before it.

Why record without the cursor

There are two reasons, and they pull in opposite directions.

The first is a clean picture. A product shot on a landing page, a recording dropped into a slide, a short loop that plays at the top of a website: none of these need a pointer. A cursor parked in the middle of the frame looks like a mistake, and in a loop it jumps from wherever it ended back to wherever it started, every few seconds.

The second is a bad cursor. The real one is a faithful record of your hand: the small shake while you read, the overshoot past a button, the long hover over the thing you were explaining. Faithful is not the same as flattering. A recording made on a large monitor and watched on a phone also shrinks the standard cursor to a few pixels. Once a recorder has drawn that cursor into the video, it is part of every frame, and short of recording again there is no way to calm it down.

When to keep the cursor

If the video teaches something, the viewer is following the pointer. Take it away and menus open by themselves, buttons light up for no visible reason, and the tutorial turns into a short film about a haunted laptop. For tutorials and walkthroughs, keep the cursor and make it calm rather than removing it. That is where a cursor recorded as data pays off most.

How to hide the cursor in Xbox Game Bar

The settings for Game Bar and OBS Studio below were checked on the vendors' own help pages on 2026-11-02.

Xbox Game Bar keeps its cursor option in Windows Settings:

Press the Start button and open Settings.
Go to Gaming, then Captures.
Turn off the option to capture the mouse cursor when recording a game.

Microsoft describes it on the Xbox Support page for capture settings in exactly those terms, as a choice about recording a game. Game Bar is built around games. If what you are recording is a spreadsheet rather than a boss fight, it is worth knowing what it can and cannot do, which I covered in Focal vs the recorders built into Windows.

How to hide the cursor in OBS Studio

In OBS Studio the cursor is a property of each capture source, and it is on by default.

In the Sources dock at the bottom of the main window, click + and add a Display Capture source for a whole monitor or a Window Capture source for one window.
Right-click the source and open its properties.
Untick Capture Cursor.

If a scene has more than one capture source, each one has its own checkbox, so check them all. The cursor always turns up in the one you skipped. The OBS Knowledge Base lists the property with the other settings of each source. OBS does far more than record, live streaming among it, and if you are choosing between it and Focal for demo videos, I compared the two in Focal vs OBS Studio.

What about the Snipping Tool

Microsoft's help page for the Snipping Tool explains how to record: select Record, then New, or press Windows + Shift + R, choose an area, then Start and later Stop. It mentions no setting for the cursor, so there is no documented way to leave it out, and I would rather not send you on a hunt for an undocumented one. If the cursor has to go, use Game Bar, OBS Studio or Focal.

The catch: you choose before you record

With Game Bar and OBS Studio, the cursor is decided before the recording starts, and the decision holds for that file. Record with it off and there is no cursor in the video to bring back later. A tutorial recorded clean stays a tutorial with no pointer. Record with it on and the cursor is drawn into every frame, at the size Windows drew it, with every wobble your hand made. Zoom into that recording in an editor and the cursor is enlarged with the pixels around it, softer the closer you go.

That also means one take cannot serve two uses. The loop for the website wants no cursor and the tutorial wants a clear one, so you record twice, and the second take is never quite the same as the first. It is also, reliably, the one where a notification slides in halfway through.

How Focal records the cursor as data

Focal records the screen without the cursor in it, every time. While you record, it logs the cursor's position, every click and the cursor's shape, a thousand times a second, on the same clock as the video. The picture and the cursor stay apart until you export, which is why the cursor can be whatever you choose afterwards. For the longer version of the reasons, I wrote about why Focal records your screen without the cursor.

In the editor, the cursor is a setting rather than a fact of the recording:

Hide it, for a clean recording with no pointer at all.
Show the standard cursors drawn as vectors, light or dark, sharp at any zoom, or use the captured cursor, or an image of your own.
Set its size, from small to large, so it still reads on a phone.
Let the raw mouse path become a steady glide, so the shake and the overshoot are gone.
Add a ripple on each click, a ring, a dot or a pulse, with an optional click sound.
Put a halo or a spotlight around it that follows it.
Let it fade when idle and come back when you move, so a pause does not leave a pointer parked on screen.

Fast cursor moves also get motion blur, on by default, with its amount in the Zoom tab, and any zoom can follow the cursor instead of holding on one point. The home page shows the cursor options in motion.

When you want a clean recording, you get the same one Game Bar or OBS Studio would give you with the cursor off. When you want a cursor, you get a better one than the real thing, with steadier hands than anyone actually has.

How to export a recording without the cursor in Focal

Press Print Screen to start. If another program already uses that key, Focal uses Ctrl+PrtSc and tells you so.
Drag a region, click a window to snap to it, or press Enter for the whole screen. For a product shot of one app, a window recording can leave out the app's own title bar, or in Chrome, Edge and other Chromium browsers, everything but the page.
After the countdown, work as you normally would. Move the mouse wherever you need to. None of it lands in the picture. Stop from the control bar.
The editor opens with zooms already made from your clicks and typing. For a still shot or a loop, turn them off with the switch for automatic zooms in the Zoom tab, or keep the ones you like.
Hide the cursor in the editor's cursor settings. The preview is drawn by the same renderer as the export, so it shows what the file will look like.
Export as MP4 up to 4K at 60 fps, or as a GIF for a README or a page that loops it. The guide to making a GIF of your screen covers that format.

If every recording should start without a cursor, save these settings as a style and set it as the default for new recordings. A style holds the cursor along with the background, padding, zoom feel and the rest of the look. You set it once and never think about it again, which is the best relationship anyone can have with a setting.

Focal is free to record and edit with every feature, with no time limit, no card and no account, from the download page. Exporting needs a license, and until you enter a key the editor's preview shows a "Made with Focal" watermark, so you can judge the cursor-free result in the preview and export the final version once you have a key.

One recording, two videos

Because the cursor is never in the picture, one take can become both videos. Export it with the cursor hidden for the landing page, then use Save a copy, turn the cursor back on in the copy with a large size, a glide and a ripple on each click, and export the walkthrough. You only have to get the demo right once, and once is hard enough. If that walkthrough is a product demo, how to record a product demo video on Windows picks up from there.

Screen recording to vertical video for Shorts, Reels and TikTok

support@focalcapture.com (Vince) — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMT

To turn a screen recording into a vertical video, reframe it to 9:16 and let zooms do the work: a tall frame that follows the part of the screen that matters, large captions for people watching with the sound off, and a background that fills whatever space is left. Posting the wide recording as it is, or cropping a slice out of the middle, rarely works. Focal, a screen recorder for Windows, does the reframing from one recording: you pick the 9:16 aspect ratio after you record, and the zooms and captions re-aim for it.

My name is Vince. I make Focal, and I have spent more evenings than I would like to admit holding a phone at arm's length, squinting at a menu that looked perfectly fine on my monitor. Here is what those evenings taught me.

Why a wide recording fails on a phone

A screen is wide and a phone held upright is tall, and neither of them is going to budge. Fit a 16:9 recording into a 9:16 frame and it becomes a strip across the middle, under a third of the frame's height, with empty space above and below. Your viewer is now looking at your app through a mail slot, and the text that was comfortable on your monitor is too small to read.

The other fix, cropping a tall slice out of the middle, keeps the height but throws away more than two thirds of the width. The menu you click is on the left, the result appears on the right, and the crop shows neither.

What works is a frame that moves: a tall window onto the recording that goes where the action is, close enough that the text reads on a phone, and pulls back only when you need the context.

Plan the recording for a tall frame

Most of the work happens before you press record, and none of it is hard.

Record a narrower window. A browser or app at about half the width of your screen fits a tall frame far better than a maximized one, and it still looks good in a wide export with a background around it.
Make the interface bigger. Zoom the browser in with Ctrl and plus, or raise the app's font size, before you record. Text that feels oversized on a monitor looks normal on a phone. If it feels a little silly while you record, it is probably the right size.
One thing at a time. Do one action, let it land, then do the next. Two things happening at opposite sides of the screen cannot both fit in a tall frame.
Fewer things on screen. Close the sidebars, panels and tabs you are not using, hide the bookmarks bar, and clear the desktop.
Keep cause and effect close. If the button you click and the result it causes sit near each other, one zoom shows both.
Keep it to one idea. A Short is one task, not a tour of the product. Record the task and stop.

If the Short is cut from a longer product demo, the planning in how to record a product demo video on Windows applies too.

Zooms are the whole trick

A vertical screen video is zoomed in most of the time. The zoom turns a strip of tiny text into a frame you can read, and the pans between zooms let a tall frame show a wide screen one part at a time.

Hold each zoom longer than you would in a wide video. On a phone the viewer sees less of the screen around the zoomed area and needs a moment to find their place. Fewer, slower, longer zooms read better on a small screen than many quick ones. A Short full of quick zooms does not feel energetic on a phone. It feels like a tour guide with a train to catch. I go deeper on making zooms look filmed rather than cut in how to add zoom effects to a screen recording.

Captions for people watching with the sound off

A lot of people scroll with the sound off: on a bus, in an open office, in bed next to someone who is trying to sleep. If your Short has narration, the captions carry it.

Large. Bigger than feels right on your monitor, because a phone shows them at a fraction of the size.
A few words at a time. A long line in a narrow frame wraps into a paragraph nobody reads. Two or three words at once, changing as you speak, keep up with the eye.
Mark the word being spoken. Coloring or boxing the current word lets a muted viewer follow your pace.
Clear of the app's buttons. Shorts, Reels and TikTok draw their own buttons down the right side and the account name and description across the bottom. The middle of the frame stays clear.

How to make captions on your own computer, and how to correct them, is in how to add captions to a screen recording.

Backgrounds and the camera

When a zoom eases out, the recording is smaller than the tall frame and something has to fill the space. Black bars look like a mistake, even when they were a decision. A soft gradient, or the recording itself blurred behind it, looks intended. Keep the background quiet so it never competes with the text.

If you are on camera, your bubble is a small shape on a small screen, so give it a clear spot. Put it near the top, a little in from the edge, where neither the app's buttons nor your captions will land on your face. A circle or a tall rectangle sits better in a narrow frame than a wide one.

How to do it in Focal

Focal records the screen without the cursor in it and logs the cursor, clicks and keys as data, so the frame can change after recording and the zooms still know where every click was.

Record as usual. Press Print Screen, then click a window to snap to it or drag a region. In Chrome, Edge and other Chromium browsers, a window recording can leave out everything but the page.
Pick 9:16 in the editor. It is the second aspect ratio in the title bar, or press 2. The automatic zooms made from your clicks and typing, and the captions, re-aim for the tall frame. 1:1 and 4:5 are there too, for posts in a feed.
Check the zooms. Give the important ones a longer hold time, or set the zoom speed to Slow for every zoom or just one. Press Z to add a zoom where one is missing, click the video to set its focus, or let a zoom follow the cursor.
Make captions with the Shorts look. They are made on your computer by a speech model that runs there. The Shorts look is one of six caption looks, and you can set captions to show a few words at a time, color or box the word being spoken, and sit in the middle of the frame.
Fill the frame. Pick one of the twelve ready-made backgrounds, a gradient of up to five colors, an image, or the recording itself blurred behind it. Turn the cursor up to a larger size so it reads on a phone. Save the whole look as a style and your next Short starts from it.
Place the camera bubble. Drag it in the preview to the top of the frame, away from the right edge, and size it so it does not crowd the text.
Export with the Shorts and Reels preset, at 1080p under Size. The preview is drawn by the same renderer as the export, so what you checked is what you get. For a 4:5 feed post, use the Instagram post preset; for 1:1, pick 1:1 and export with your own settings.
Export the wide version from the same recording. Use Save a copy, set the aspect ratio back to 16:9 in the copy and export with the YouTube preset. You keep both edits and record nothing twice.

Focal writes an MP4 to a folder on your computer and does not post anywhere for you, so you upload the file to each app yourself. The hashtags, I am afraid, are still yours to write. Focal is free to record and edit with every feature and no time limit, and exporting needs a license. Download the trial and see your next Short in the preview before you decide.

Doing it by hand in an editor

Any video editor with keyframes can do this, and if you already have one it costs nothing, which is a price I cannot beat. Make a 9:16 project, put the wide recording on the timeline, scale it up until the text is readable, and add position keyframes so the frame moves to each click. Put a blurred copy of the recording on the track below to fill the empty space. Then add captions and keep them off the bottom of the frame.

It works. It is also slow. Every move is a pair of keyframes and an easing curve you set by hand, the cursor gets soft as you scale it up because it is part of the pixels, and the wide version means placing every keyframe again. For one Short a month, an editor you already know is fine. For one every week, that hand work is what I built Focal to remove.

Screen recordings for READMEs, pull requests and bug reports

support@focalcapture.com (Vince) — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A ten-second clip explains a UI change faster than a paragraph, and it settles a bug report that words cannot. On GitHub you drag a GIF or a video into an issue, a pull request or a comment, up to 10 MB for a GIF and 10 or 100 MB for a video, depending on the plan of whoever owns the repository. A README is different: it shows a GIF committed to the repository, and anything longer is better linked than embedded. The rest is craft: one change per clip, cropped to the window, short enough to watch twice. The worked example here is Focal, a screen recorder for Windows, but the rules hold for any recorder.

My name is Vince. I make Focal, and I have posted my share of clips that explained nothing to anyone, including me a week later. That is how I came to have rules about them.

What GitHub accepts in issues, pull requests and comments

I checked GitHub's page on attaching files on 2026-11-02. The mechanics are what you would guess: drag a file into the comment box to attach it, or click the paperclip below an issue comment box or in the formatting bar above a pull request comment box. In many browsers you can also paste an image straight in.

Images and media are accepted everywhere you can attach a file: PNG, GIF, JPEG and SVG, and video as MP4, MOV or WebM. The size limits on that page:

Images and GIFs: 10 MB.
Videos, in a repository owned by a user or organization on a free plan: 10 MB.
Videos, in a repository owned by a user or organization on a paid plan: 100 MB. Above 10 MB you need to be a member of that organization, an outside collaborator, or on a paid plan yourself.
All other files: 25 MB.

Two more lines on that page deserve your attention. Whether a video plays depends on the browser's support for its codec, and GitHub recommends H.264 for the widest compatibility, so export H.264 rather than HEVC for anything you attach. And files uploaded to a public repository can be opened without signing in. Look at the whole frame before you post: a token in a terminal, a name in a sidebar, a notification in the corner. Code review goes over the diff line by line, and nobody reviews the corners of a GIF, so that part is yours.

What a README can show

GitHub's guide to basic writing and formatting shows how to display an image in a Markdown file, and says to use a relative link when the image lives in your repository. GitHub counts a GIF as an image, so a README shows one the same way: commit it, to docs/demo.gif for example, and point the image link at that relative path.

Video is where GitHub's documentation goes quiet. It describes uploading video to issues, pull requests and comments, and I found nothing there about a video in a README, so I do not build on one. The README gets a short GIF of the main idea, and a line under it links to the full MP4 where it already plays: the pull request that shipped the feature, an issue, or a page on your own site.

Keep that GIF small. It loads with the page, and once it is committed every clone of the repository carries it, even after you replace it. A 40 MB GIF merged in a hurry is downloaded by every contributor who ever clones the repository, long after the screen it shows has been redesigned. The guide to making a GIF of your screen on Windows goes further into GIFs.

What makes a clip useful in a pull request

A reviewer has the diff on one side and one question: what does this look like now? The clip answers that and nothing else. It is a screenshot that moves, not a trailer. These are the rules I would give a colleague:

One change per clip. If the pull request changes two things, record two clips and put each next to the paragraph that describes it.
Crop to the window. A whole desktop shrunk into a comment column is unreadable. Record the app's window, or only the page in a browser, and the change is big enough to see.
Match the repository's screenshots. If the README shows the app in a light theme, record in light. A dark clip next to light screenshots looks like a different product.
Show the keystroke when the shortcut is the point. A clip of a new command palette that never shows Ctrl+K being pressed leaves the reviewer guessing. A small pill with the combination settles it.
Hide an idle cursor. A cursor parked where you last clicked sits on top of the thing that changed. Move it away, or use a recorder that fades it out when it stops.
Zoom on what changed. A one-pixel border fix is invisible at full window size. Zoom in on it, hold, and come back out.
Under ten seconds for a GIF. A GIF has no sound and grows quickly with every second. Past ten seconds, or as soon as you want to talk over it, export an MP4.

What a bug report clip should show

A bug report clip has a harder job than a pull request clip: it has to show the way to the bug, not only the bug. Start from a state anyone can reach, a fresh page load, a new file, the app just opened. Show the version on screen before the first step, in the About box, the footer, or the output of the version command in a terminal. Then do the steps one at a time, at the pace of someone seeing them for the first time, not someone who has reproduced the bug forty times this morning. Hold on the wrong result for a second or two so nobody mistakes it for a frame that flashed by. Bug clips usually run long, so make them MP4s.

In the text of the issue, write the steps as a numbered list, what you expected, what happened instead, the version and the version of Windows. The clip proves the bug, and the words make it searchable. A maintainer looking for duplicates searches text, not frames.

One Windows catch. If the app you are reporting on runs as administrator, its clicks and keys are hidden from Focal unless Focal also runs as administrator. Focal warns before you record such a window, and the editor marks that stretch of the recording. Click zooms and keystroke pills need those clicks and keys, so for an installer or an elevated tool, start Focal as administrator for that recording, or accept a clip without them.

Making the clip with Focal

Focal sits in the system tray, out of the way. The whole routine is six steps:

Snap to the window. Press Print Screen (or Ctrl+PrtSc, if another program owns Print Screen, and Focal says so), then click the window. For a web app, Focal can leave out everything but the page in Chrome, Edge and other Chromium browsers, or leave out an app's own title bar, and it remembers the choice per app.
Set Keystrokes to Shortcuts. Key combinations such as Ctrl+C and function keys then show as a pill at the bottom or top of the video, timed with cuts and speed changes. Focal keeps that choice for next time. Everything shows all typing, for one recording only, but that recording's input log keeps every key, passwords included, and Focal warns before that project is exported or shared. For pull requests and bug reports, Shortcuts is the setting.
Record the one change. After the countdown, do it, then stop from the control bar.
Check the zooms. The editor opens with zooms already made from your clicks. Delete one that does not help, or press Z to add one on the thing that changed. The cursor is drawn after recording, so it fades when idle and comes back when you move, stays sharp at any zoom, and can be light or dark to match the theme.
Trim. Cut the start and the end on the timeline down to the change, or press I and O around it and export only that part, keeping the whole take for later.
Export. Use the GIF preset for a README or a short silent clip, or MP4 with H.264 for anything longer or with your voice.

Focal has no cloud and no share links, so the exported file goes into the comment box the same way as any other file. If you make clips for the same repository often, save the background, padding, corners and cursor as a Style and set it as the default, so every clip matches the last one.

When a colleague should change the clip rather than only watch it, open the Projects window and pack the recording into a single .focalproj file. If they have Focal, a double-click imports it, and because the cursor, clicks and keys are kept as data rather than pixels, they can still move a zoom, resize the cursor or trim it differently. It is the nearest a video gets to a suggested change. Someone without Focal needs the exported MP4 or GIF.

For a walkthrough longer than a pull request needs, with your voice and captions, see how to record a coding tutorial on Windows. Focal is free to record and edit with every feature, with no time limit, no card and no account. Exporting the GIF or the MP4 needs a license, and until you enter a key the editor's preview shows a "Made with Focal" watermark.

The best screen recorders for Windows in 2026, by purpose

support@focalcapture.com (Vince) — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The best screen recorder for Windows depends on what the video is for. For a quick clip, Xbox Game Bar and Snipping Tool are already on your PC. For free and powerful with some setup, OBS Studio and ShareX. For a demo that looks edited without editing, Focal, a screen recorder for Windows, along with FocuSee and Cursorful. For a full editor, Camtasia. For a link your team can watch, Loom.

My name is Vince, and Focal is the one I make, which turns this into a festival review written by one of the bands. I have tried to be generous about the other stages and honest about my own set. Every tool here is written up the way I would want mine written up: what it is for, what it will not do and what it costs, all checked on the vendor's own site.

The list is grouped by purpose, not ranked, because the best tool for saving a game highlight is the wrong tool for a training course, and the other way round. Find the group that matches the video you are making and read the entries in it. The table further down puts every tool side by side.

How to choose a screen recorder

Five questions settle most of it.

What are you recording? A game, a bug, a walkthrough of an app, a lesson, a message to a colleague.
Who sees it? One teammate, a customer, or strangers on YouTube or your landing page.
Does it need to look edited? Zooms on what you click, a smooth cursor, captions and a background, or is the plain screen fine.
Does it stay on your machine? Some tools write a file to your disk, others put the video in their cloud by design.
One-off or subscription? Free, paid once, or paid every year.

If you are not sure what you need yet, start with what Windows already has. Plenty of videos need nothing you have to install, and I am aware that is an odd thing for me to put in writing. My guide to recording your screen on Windows 11 covers every built-in way and when you need more.

For a quick clip right now

Xbox Game Bar: built in, made for games

Xbox Game Bar comes with Windows 10 and 11 and handles game captures. Go to the game or app you want, press Windows key + Alt + R to start and again to stop, and the clip is saved as an MP4 under Videos, in a folder called Captures. Turn on background recording and Windows key + Alt + G saves the last few moments. That is what it is best at: keeping something that just happened, like the shot you could never pull off twice.

It records the app in front of you, not the desktop or File Explorer, and Microsoft says it supports one monitor at a time. Recording clips needs a graphics card with a hardware video encoder from Intel, NVIDIA or AMD, and some games block recording altogether. Microsoft's capture guide has the shortcuts.

Platform and price: Windows 10 and 11, free and built in.

Snipping Tool: any rectangle you draw

On Windows 11, Snipping Tool records video as well as screenshots. Press Windows key + Shift + R, drag a rectangle over any part of the screen, press Start, then Stop. It can include your microphone and the sound from your PC. It is best for a short clip of one part of the screen, a bug or a setting, sent to someone a minute later under the words "see, it does this."

What you get is the recording exactly as it happened. Captions and audio changes come afterwards, through the Edit in Clipchamp button, which opens the clip in Clipchamp, Microsoft's video editor. Microsoft's Snipping Tool page has the steps, and I put both built-in tools next to Focal in Focal vs the recorders built into Windows.

Platform and price: Windows 11, free and built in.

Free and powerful, if you set it up

OBS Studio: scenes, sources and streaming

OBS Studio is free and open source software for video recording and live streaming. You build scenes out of sources (window captures, images, text, browser windows, webcams) and switch between them, with an audio mixer that has filters per source, such as noise suppression and gain, and plugins and scripts for anything else. It is the best tool here for live streaming, for laying out several sources in one recording, and for anyone who wants to control every setting.

What it will not do is decide anything for you. You set up the scenes, the encoder and the output, and the file it writes is what was on screen, every hesitation included. A polished demo means editing it in another app afterwards. I go through that trade in Focal vs OBS Studio for demo videos.

Platform and price: Windows 10 and 11, macOS 13 or newer, and Linux, free.

ShareX: capture, then upload

ShareX is a free, open source screenshot tool for Windows that also records the screen, as a video or as a GIF. It captures the full screen, a region, a window, a monitor or a scrolling page, then hands the result to after-capture tasks: copy it, pin it to the screen, read the text in it, or upload it to one of a long list of destinations. It is best for people who capture many times a day and want every capture handled the same way without touching it.

It is a capture tool first, and a recording comes out as recorded. In my experience the settings take a while to learn, which is the price of how much it can do. No tool that does this much has ever had a short settings page. That is not a complaint, it is arithmetic.

Platform and price: Windows, free.

For a demo that looks edited without editing

These three make the zooms for you, from your clicks, so the first cut is already watchable when you stop. If you came here looking for Screen Studio on Windows, this is the group, and I wrote about what to use instead on its own.

Focal: the one I make

Focal records the screen without the cursor in it and logs the cursor, clicks and key timings as data. When you stop, the editor opens with zooms already made from your clicks and typing, and a smooth cursor. Captions are made on your computer, in 26 languages, and zooms, cursor, captions and camera can all be changed after recording. Recordings stay on your disk, with no account.

Its limits: Windows only, paid, and no cloud, share links or viewer analytics. The installer is not code-signed yet, so Windows SmartScreen warns before it runs, which is not the first impression any developer dreams of making. The free trial has every feature and no time limit for recording and editing, and exporting needs a license.

Platform and price: Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit, $99 once.

FocuSee: auto zoom on Windows and Mac

FocuSee is a screen recorder whose automatic zoom follows clicks and typing, with cursor styles, click animations, webcam layouts, subtitles and one-click resizing for social platforms. It exports video up to 4K at 60 fps or a GIF, saves recordings locally by default, and can also share through a link with a password and permissions. It is the closest to Focal on this list, and it runs on a Mac as well, which Focal does not. If a Mac is anywhere in your plans, that may settle it on its own.

Auto subtitles cover 9 languages on every plan. The AI subtitles in more than 55 languages, filler word removal and voice enhancement spend AI credits, and the Standard plan includes none. The lifetime license covers version 2.x, and the next major version is a paid upgrade. I compare the two in Focal vs FocuSee.

Platform and price: Windows and macOS. Standard is $49.99 a year or $19.99 a month for 1 computer, Advanced $79.99 a year or $24.99 a month for up to 3, or $199.99 once for up to 5.

Cursorful: from the browser to the desktop

Cursorful began as a browser extension and now has desktop apps too. The free extension records your browser in Chrome, Edge and Brave, and zooms and pans when two or more clicks happen within 3 seconds. The Pro desktop apps record any app on screen and capture the pointer separately so it can be redrawn, an idea I am in no position to argue with. Captions are generated on your device, rendering is local, and cloud features such as streaming links are opt-in. It is best for web app demos, and the free plan has no sign-up and no watermark.

The free plan is for non-commercial use, and the microphone, camera and desktop apps come with Pro. Firefox is not supported. More in Focal vs Cursorful.

Platform and price: the extension on Windows, macOS and Linux, the Pro apps on Windows and macOS. Free for non-commercial use, or Pro at $79 per seat, paid once (a launch price, down from $119).

For a full editor

Camtasia: a recorder joined to a timeline

Camtasia from TechSmith pairs a screen recorder with a full video editor. It records the screen, camera, system audio and microphone as separate layers, and the editor has annotations, callouts, cursor effects and text-based editing. SmartFocus adds zoom and pan animations from the cursor movement and clicks in a recording, and TechSmith says it works best on recordings longer than 30 seconds. It is the right pick when the video is a course or a training piece that you will cut, narrate and revise, and then revise again the week the app you are teaching moves a button.

The catch is the cost. You can use the full editor for free, but exports carry a watermark until you pay for Essentials or above, and Starter, the cheapest plan, is meant for screen capture and still watermarks the editor. Caption generation starts at Essentials. More in Focal vs Camtasia.

Platform and price: Windows and macOS. Yearly subscriptions: Starter $39, Essentials $179.88, Create $249 and Pro $599 a year.

For a link your team can watch

Loom: a recording that is a link

Loom records your screen and camera and turns the recording into something you share: people watch it, comment and react, and you see viewer insights. There is a desktop app (up to 4K, any window, full screen or an area, with clicks highlighted) and a Chrome extension (up to 720p). Transcriptions and closed captions are on every plan. It is the best tool here when the video is a message to colleagues rather than something you publish, the kind of message that would otherwise have been a meeting.

The videos live in Loom's cloud, and the free Starter plan allows 25 videos per person, 5 minutes each, at up to 720p. Downloading videos and removing Loom branding start at Business. More in Focal vs Loom.

Platform and price: Mac, Windows, iOS and Android. Starter is free, Business is $18 per user per month and Business + AI $24 per user per month, billed monthly, with up to 17% off for paying annually.

Every tool side by side

Checked on 2026-11-02 on each vendor's own site. "Not listed" means the vendor's own pages do not mention the feature. Prices are the part most likely to have moved since, so look again before you buy.

Tool	Platform	Price model	Auto zoom	Captions	Where recordings live
Xbox Game Bar	Windows 10 and 11	Free, built in	Not listed	Not listed	Your PC
Snipping Tool	Windows 11	Free, built in	Not listed	Through Clipchamp	Your PC
OBS Studio	Windows, macOS, Linux	Free, open source	Not listed	Not listed	Your PC
ShareX	Windows	Free, open source	Not listed	Not listed	Your PC, plus where you upload
Focal	Windows 10 and 11	$99 once	From clicks and typing	On your PC, 26 languages	Your PC
FocuSee	Windows, macOS	Yearly, monthly or lifetime	From clicks and typing	9 languages, more with AI credits	Your PC, cloud optional
Cursorful	Extension on Windows, macOS, Linux, apps on Windows and macOS	Free for non-commercial use, Pro paid once	From clicks	On your device	Your PC, cloud optional
Camtasia	Windows, macOS	Yearly subscription	SmartFocus	From Essentials	Your PC, Screencast optional
Loom	Mac, Windows, iOS, Android	Free tier, then per user per month	Not listed	Every plan	Loom's cloud

The question that decides it

Most of this list sorts itself once you answer one question: does the recording need to look edited? If it does not, use what Windows has, or OBS Studio or ShareX, and spend nothing. If it is a message for colleagues, Loom's link is the point. If it has to look edited and you are happy to edit it yourself, Camtasia has the timeline. If it has to look edited and you would rather not edit at all, that is the group Focal, FocuSee and Cursorful are in. The fair way to choose between those three is to record the same two minutes in each, which is the one test in this article I could not rig if I tried. Focal's trial is free to record and edit with every feature and no time limit, and the pricing page has the rest.

What your GPU's video encoder does for a screen recording

support@focalcapture.com (Vince) — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Your GPU's video encoder is a separate part of the graphics chip that does one job: it turns frames of pixels into compressed video, so your CPU does not have to. It is the difference between a screen recording that stutters, drops frames and spins up the fan, and one you forget is running. Focal, a screen recorder for Windows, records straight into it.

My name is Vince, and I make Focal. Building a screen recorder means pressing record more times than anyone should and listening, every time, for the laptop fan to go from a hum to a leaf blower. Here is what I learned about the part of the chip that keeps it at a hum.

Why encoding is the expensive part

A 4K screen is 3840 by 2160 pixels, a little over 8 million of them. At 60 frames a second that is about 500 million pixels every second, and at four bytes a pixel, about 2 GB of raw image a second. An hour of it, stored as is, would fill more than 7 TB.

Nobody stores that. A video encoder compares each frame with the ones around it, keeps what changed, describes the rest as "the same as before, moved a little", and drops detail your eye will not miss. The file comes out hundreds of times smaller. That takes a great deal of arithmetic, and it has a deadline: at 60 fps each frame has to be done in about 16.7 milliseconds, or the next one arrives first. That is sixty deadlines a second, and not one of them can be moved.

Capturing the screen is cheap by comparison, because the picture already exists: Windows draws your desktop on the GPU to show it on your monitor. Encoding is where the work is. Done on the CPU, with a software encoder such as x264, it competes with the very thing you are recording: the build in your terminal, the browser with forty tabs, the game, the video call. When the CPU falls behind, a recorder can skip frames or queue them, and both show up in the video as stutter.

What the hardware encoder changes

Almost every graphics chip sold in the last ten years, from a gaming card to the graphics built into a laptop processor, has a block of silicon that does nothing but encode video. NVIDIA calls theirs NVENC. AMD's is VCN, short for Video Core Next, and Intel's is Quick Sync Video. Whatever the name, it runs alongside the part that draws your windows rather than taking turns with it, and it barely needs the CPU.

What that buys you:

The CPU stays free. Encoding drops from a large share of the processor to a few percent, so the program you are recording runs almost as it would with no recorder at all.
No dropped frames. Real-time video is what the block was made for, so it keeps pace with the screen even when the rest of the machine is busy.
A laptop that stays cool. A block built for one job spends a fraction of the power the CPU would on the same frames, so the fan stays quiet, the battery lasts longer and your lap stops being part of the cooling system.

Here is what that looks like in Focal. Measured on 2026-10-31 on an RTX 3090 with a Ryzen 9 9950X3D, an hour of recording at 4K 60 fps with everything on used 4.8% of the CPU: 216,032 frames, none dropped, memory flat at 130 MB. That is one machine, and other machines differ. More of Focal's numbers are on the home page.

H.264 and HEVC

These are the two formats a hardware encoder usually writes. H.264 is the one nearly everything plays: browsers, phones, editors and the sites you upload to. HEVC, also called H.265, is its successor and makes a smaller file at the same quality, but some older devices and apps still do not play it.

Recent hardware encoders handle both. Focal records in HEVC on NVIDIA GPUs and exports MP4 in either. Its exports give both codecs the same bitrate at each quality, so an HEVC export is no smaller than an H.264 one, and the Export dialog says what it costs you: fewer players can open it. My own rule is H.264 for any file that leaves my computer. No file is small enough to make up for a phone call about why it will not play.

Why frames should stay on the GPU

The screen image starts on the GPU, and the encoder is on the GPU. A recorder that copies each frame into main memory, works on it there and sends it back is moving that whole torrent, 2 GB a second, over to the CPU's side of the machine and back again, and spending processor time on every copy. It is the video version of printing an email so you can scan it back in, once for every frame. That is where a lot of recorders lose time, and why some still drop frames on a busy machine with a hardware encoder sitting right there.

The fast route is the short one. The frame goes from the screen to the encoder without leaving the GPU, and only the compressed video, hundreds of times smaller, comes back to be written to disk. Focal records straight into the GPU's hardware encoder, and every frame is on disk the moment it is written, so a crash or a power cut keeps what you had.

Export is encoding too

Exporting an edited recording is the same job with an extra step at the front. The recorded video is decoded back into frames, the edits are drawn onto each one (the zoom, the cursor, the captions, the background), and the result is encoded again. GPUs have a separate block for decoding as well, so all three steps can stay on the graphics chip.

Focal does it that way: decoding, compositing and encoding all run on the GPU. On the machine above, a 4K recording exported to 1080p ran 8 times faster than real time, so ten minutes of recording took about a minute and a quarter. That is not long enough to justify getting up for coffee, though I have tried.

What if your machine has no hardware encoder

Some machines have none: older desktops, a few budget graphics cards, and some virtual machines, which can hand the system inside them a plain display adapter with no video blocks at all.

In that case Focal falls back to the CPU. A modern desktop CPU still records 4K at 60 fps. A laptop CPU may not, more so on battery, when it runs slower to save power. The answer there is fewer pixels: a lower resolution or a lower frame rate. In Focal the simple way to get fewer pixels is to record one window or a region instead of the whole monitor, which for a demo is often the clearer video anyway. Nobody has finished watching a demo wishing they had seen more of the taskbar.

If you only need a quick clip, Windows has recorders of its own, and how to record your screen on Windows 11 goes through each built-in way and when you need more.

How to tell which one your machine has

Open Task Manager with Ctrl+Shift+Esc, go to the Performance tab and select your GPU. The four small graphs at the top each show one engine of the chip, and clicking the name above a graph lets you switch it to another engine. On many cards one of them is called Video Encode. Start a recording and watch it: if that graph rises while the CPU graph stays low, the hardware encoder is doing the work. If the CPU graph is the one climbing, the fan will usually tell you before Task Manager does.

Intel graphics may show no graph by that name. Intel's support pages explain that its encoder shows up as Video Decode 1. If no GPU appears in the list at all, update the graphics driver, since Task Manager only shows GPU engines with a recent enough one.

What to ask of a recorder

Three questions cover most of it. Does it use the hardware encoder? What does it fall back to when there is none? And does it say what it measured, and on which machine? A number with no machine attached is a weather forecast with no city.

If you know OBS Studio, Focal vs OBS Studio for demo videos compares the two for that kind of recording. What Focal does beyond recording, from automatic zooms to captions, is in the Focal 1.0 announcement. The surest test is your own computer: recording with the free trial has no time limit and needs no card or account, so record ten minutes with Task Manager open and watch the Video Encode graph.

Why Focal costs $99 once and not $10 a month

support@focalcapture.com (Vince) — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Focal, a screen recorder for Windows, costs $99 once. There is no monthly plan and there will not be one. The reason fits in a sentence: Focal uploads nothing, so I have no servers to run for you and no monthly cost to pass on.

My name is Vince. I make Focal on my own, so I also set its price on my own, in a pricing meeting with one attendee that still somehow ran long. Here is how I got to $99, and where a subscription would serve you better, because sometimes it would.

What $99 gets you

One license is for one person on up to 3 computers, and it includes every update I publish in the 12 months after you buy. When those 12 months end, the version you have keeps working, with no lock and no reminder asking you to pay. If you want another year of updates, an optional renewal costs $49. Commercial use is included, so a demo for your company or a course you sell needs nothing extra. Students, teachers and researchers get 40% off by email. If Focal is not right for you, you can have a refund within 14 days of buying, no questions asked, once per person.

Focal is sold through Polar, the merchant of record. Polar handles VAT and sales tax and emails you the receipt and an invoice, which matters when you buy on a company card and accounting asks what, exactly, a Focal is. The pricing page has all of this in one place.

Why not a subscription

There is no monthly cost to pass on

A subscription makes sense when a product costs money every month to keep running. A recorder that uploads your videos, stores them and streams them to viewers through share links has exactly that cost, and a monthly price is a fair way to pay for it. I wrote about when that kind of tool is the better choice in Focal vs Loom.

Focal does none of that. Recordings, edits and captions are made and kept on your computer, and nothing is uploaded. Even the captions come from a speech model that runs there. There is no account, so there is no account server. I explained why I built it that way in your screen recording should stay on your computer. The work happens on your hardware, not mine, and a monthly price would charge you for servers that do not exist. I could rent a few so the bill had something to point at. I decided against it.

A tool you use now and then should not bill you every month

Most people do not record their screen every day. They record a demo before a launch, a bug for a pull request, a tutorial when a feature ships. A few times a month, sometimes less. A subscription keeps charging through the quiet months, which is how everyone ends up with a line on their card statement they half recognize and keep paying, because canceling means remembering which email they used.

Here is the arithmetic, once. $10 a month is $120 a year, and $360 over three years. Focal is $99 once, less than one year of that, and the version you bought still works in year three. If you renew for updates every year, three years of Focal with every update cost $197.

I have to earn the renewal

A one-time price changes who carries the decision. With a subscription, paying is the default and stopping is the choice you make. With Focal, you pay once and nothing happens after that unless you decide the next year of updates is worth $49 to you. That is mine to earn, with updates that make your recordings better, not with a reminder or a lock. It is a comfortable arrangement for you and a mildly nerve-racking one for me, which is the right way around.

If a year goes by and the updates do not interest you, keep the version you have. It will keep working.

Why a year of updates and not updates forever

Focal keeps changing. Version 1.0.0 came out on 2026-11-02, and there is a lot I still want to add. Updates forever for one payment sounds generous, but it only works while new buyers pay for the work that old buyers receive, and that is a promise I could not keep honestly for years. I would rather promise you one good year and mean it than promise forever and hope.

A year of updates with an optional renewal keeps a one-time price honest for a product that keeps changing: you know what you paid for, and I know what I owe you.

Why three computers

Most people who record their screen use more than one computer: a desktop at the desk and a laptop for travel, or a work machine and a home one. A license for one computer would make you choose, or pay twice. Three covers the usual pair with one to spare, for one person. The spare is for the new laptop that arrives before you have retired the old one.

What a subscription does better

I do not think subscriptions are wrong, and sometimes one would serve you better than Focal's price.

If you need a recorder for one project this month and never again, $10 for that month is less than $99. A subscription also spreads the cost out, and for the people who make the software it brings a steady income, which is a fair reason so many choose it. I am one of those people, and I will not pretend the steady part does not sound nice.

There is a trade-off in how Focal checks a license, too. Once a key is entered, Focal checks it with Polar about once a day, so it needs the internet now and then. It works offline for 28 days, which covers a long trip or a month of bad Wi-Fi, but not a computer that never goes online. After that, exporting pauses until a check succeeds, while recording and editing carry on. The last week is counted down, so the pause never comes without warning. If that check ever ends for good, the license agreement promises a version of Focal that runs without it, so the copy you paid for does not depend on the check staying around.

And a recorder built around the cloud gives you things Focal does not have: share links, viewer analytics, a team workspace. If those are what you need, a subscription to a tool made for them is money well spent.

The launch price and the trial

At launch, Focal is $79 instead of $99 with the code LAUNCH typed at checkout, once per customer. The license is the same: one person, 3 computers, 12 months of updates, and the version you have keeps working after that.

You do not have to decide before you try it. The free trial has no time limit: recording and editing work with every feature for as long as you like, with no card and no account. Exporting is what the license is for. Until you enter a key, no video or GIF can be exported and the editor's preview shows a "Made with Focal" watermark, and a key turns exporting on and takes the watermark off. Your recordings stay on disk either way.

Record the thing you were going to record anyway, the demo you have been putting off since Tuesday, watch it in the preview, and see whether the result is worth $99 to you.

Why Focal records your screen without the cursor

support@focalcapture.com (Vince) — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Focal, a screen recorder for Windows, records your screen without the cursor in it and keeps the cursor as data instead: where it is, when you click and what shape it takes, a thousand times a second, on the same clock as the video. A cursor painted into the pixels is final the moment you stop recording. A cursor kept as data stays a decision you make later, and most of Focal is built on that difference.

My name is Vince, and I make Focal. This is the decision the rest of it follows from, and I should admit it did not begin as a principle. It began as one of my own recordings, which felt fine while I was making it and was hard to watch afterwards, mostly because of a small arrow that would not hold still.

What a cursor in the pixels costs you

Most screen recorders capture the screen with the cursor drawn in. The cursor in the video is the cursor you had, with everything that is wrong with it.

It moves in steps. A 60 fps video sees the cursor 60 times a second, so a quick move across the screen arrives as a handful of positions with gaps between them, and every small shake of your hand is kept. Played back, the cursor looks nervous.

It is small. A 4K screen exported at 1080p is shrunk to half its width, and the cursor shrinks with it. On a phone it becomes a speck that people lose track of.

It is fixed. You cannot enlarge it, hide it for a section, smooth its path or show that a click happened, because it is not an object in the file. It is a few dozen pixels painted over each frame.

It goes soft when you zoom. Zooms are what make a screen recording readable on a small screen, and when you zoom into recorded pixels the cursor is enlarged with them and blurs like everything else. The jittery little arrow you recorded is the jittery little arrow you keep. Forever. In every zoom.

What recording the cursor as data gives you

The video has no cursor in it, so Focal draws one when it renders the preview and the export, along the logged path. Each problem above turns into a setting, which is a much better thing for a problem to be. The cursor section of the home page shows them moving, and here they are by name:

A steady glide. The raw mouse path becomes a smooth one, so the cursor travels like a hand that knows where it is going.
A ripple on each click. A ring, a dot or a pulse, with an optional click sound, so viewers see that something was pressed.
Vector cursors. The standard cursors are drawn as vectors, light or dark, and stay sharp at any zoom, because they are drawn for the output rather than enlarged from the screen.
A size, from small to large.
A halo or a spotlight that follows the cursor and pulls the eye to it.
Fading when idle. The cursor fades when you stop moving and comes back when you move.
The captured cursor, or your own image, if you would rather keep what Windows showed you or use something else.
No cursor at all, because the recording never had one. How to record your screen without the cursor on Windows covers that case.

Fast cursor moves also get the motion blur that zooms and pans get, on by default, with its amount in the Zoom tab.

What else reads the same data

The cursor is the obvious use of the log, but it is not the only one. The same record of where you clicked and when you typed answers most of the questions an editor has to ask about a recording.

Automatic zoom

When you stop recording, the editor opens with zooms already made, and they come from the log. Focal knows where you clicked and when you typed, so it knows where to point the camera and when. You choose what starts a zoom: clicks, right clicks, other buttons, typing, shortcuts or scrolling. Zooms close together join into one that pans, and the camera waits for each click rather than drifting toward the next one. A zoom you add by hand can follow the cursor, which works because its position is known for every frame. The zoom section shows it, and how to add zoom effects to a screen recording goes through it step by step.

Two smaller things come from the same place. Clicks on Focal's own control bar, the small bar with the time, pause and stop, never cause a zoom, so no video of yours ends on a slow, dramatic push toward the stop button. And when you change a recording's shape from 16:9 to 9:16 for Shorts, the zooms and captions are re-aimed for the narrow frame instead of cropping the middle and hoping. Turning a screen recording into a vertical video has the details.

Keys, camera and captions

The same idea holds for everything else Focal records. Nothing is painted into the screen recording if it can be kept apart and drawn later.

Keys are logged as timings. With keystrokes set to Shortcuts, key combinations such as Ctrl+C appear as a pill at the bottom or top of the video, drawn at export and timed with your cuts and speed changes.
The camera is kept apart from the screen. Its shape (a circle, a rounded square, or a wide or tall rectangle), border, shadow, size and place are chosen in the editor, and the live bubble you watch while recording never appears in the video. I mostly use mine to check my hair, and that stays between me and the bubble.
Captions are a transcript, made on your computer by a speech model that runs there, and you edit them as text. Select words in the captions list to cut them from the video, or tighten long pauses, and the pauses where you clicked or typed stay, because the log says something was happening on screen.

What it costs

Keeping the cursor out of the pixels is not free, and I would rather you heard about the costs from me than from a recording, so here they are before you press record.

The cursor is redrawn. The vector cursors are the standard Windows shapes, so a custom cursor theme is not reproduced unless you choose the captured cursor or your own image. Since the vector cursors are the ones that stay sharp at any zoom, that is a real trade.

Windows run as administrator hide their clicks. A window run as administrator hides its clicks and keys from Focal unless Focal also runs as administrator. Focal warns before you record such a window, and the editor marks the stretch. Without clicks, that stretch has nothing for automatic zoom or the click ripple to work from.

The log can hold what you typed. Keystrokes are Off by default. Set them to Everything and the recording's input log keeps everything you type, passwords included, so Focal warns before such a project is exported or shared.

What it gives the recording itself

There is one benefit before any editing: the pixels are clean. A recording made for a product page, or a short loop for a website, comes out with no pointer parked over the thing you are showing, and exports as an MP4 or a GIF. A cursor left in a shot like that is the stranger standing in front of the monument in every holiday photo. If the cursor would be in the way, you leave it out, and nothing has to be painted over.

What it looks like when you edit

Record the way you always do: press Print Screen, drag a region or click a window, and stop when you are done. The editor opens with zooms made and the cursor already gliding.

Then work down the cursor controls. Pick the cursor first: a vector one in light or dark, the captured one, or your own image. Set the size, small for a busy interface and large for a video people will watch on a phone. Choose the click ripple (a ring, a dot or a pulse) and whether clicks make a sound. Add a halo or a spotlight if the cursor needs finding, and let it fade when idle so it does not sit over the text you are talking about. The preview is drawn by the same renderer as the export, so the cursor you settle on there is the one in the file.

When you like it, save it in a style with your background, zoom feel and the rest, and set that style as the default for new recordings. The next recording opens looking the same, with nothing to redo, and you can stop thinking about the cursor altogether, which is all I ever wanted from one.

Focal 1.0 has the tour of everything else, and the free trial on the download page has every feature and no time limit, with no card and no account. Exporting is the one thing that needs a license.

Your screen recording should stay on your computer

support@focalcapture.com (Vince) — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A screen recording is the most revealing file most people ever make. It holds whatever was on screen: the open tabs, an inbox, names in a chat, a customer's record, source code, a password typed while it was recording, and on top of that your voice and often your face. Focal, a screen recorder for Windows, is built on the view that a file like that belongs on your computer. It has no account, no sign-in, no telemetry and no crash reporting, and it makes and keeps recordings, edits and captions on your own disk, in folders you can open.

My name is Vince, and I make Focal. More than once, the most interesting thing in one of my own recordings was not the feature I was showing but the inbox I forgot to close. Here is what Focal keeps, the four things it sends, and where its protection stops and yours starts.

Why most screen recorders upload

Many of the popular recorders are built around a link. You stop recording, the video is already on the vendor's servers, and a link to it is on your clipboard. The link is the product: the viewer page, the comments, the count of who watched and for how long. None of that works unless the video lives on someone else's computer, so the upload is not a side effect. It is the design. So is the account, which tells the servers whose video they are holding.

For a team that trades quick updates all day, that is a good trade, and I say so in Focal vs Loom. It is a bad trade when the recording shows a client's data or code that is not public yet, or when all you wanted was a video file. Storing everyone's videos also costs money every month, which is part of why so many recorders are subscriptions. Focal stores nothing of yours, which is one of the reasons it costs $99 once.

So Focal has no share links, no viewer analytics and no team workspace. You get an MP4 or a GIF, and you decide where it goes, which used to be the entire job description of a file.

What Focal sends, item by item

Four things leave your computer, and nothing else. The privacy note has every detail, down to each folder and registry entry.

The license check. During the trial, nothing is sent. Once you enter a license key, Focal sends it to Polar, the store Focal is sold through, to activate it on that computer, then about once a day to confirm it is still valid, and again when you press Deactivate. Each request carries the key, Focal's id at Polar, your computer's name as Windows knows it (so you can tell your computers apart in Polar's customer portal), a fingerprint of the computer and your IP address. The fingerprint is a one-way hash of the id Windows gives its installation. It ties the activation to that computer, and it cannot be turned back into the id. Polar's answer includes the email you bought with, which Settings shows you. A licensed copy works for 28 days without a connection. After that, exporting pauses until a check succeeds, and recording and editing carry on.

The update check. With "Check for updates automatically" on in Settings, which it is to begin with, Focal fetches a small file from releases.focalcapture.com shortly after it starts and once a day after that, never during a recording or an export. The request carries your IP address, as every web request does, and the fact that it comes from an updater. It says nothing about you or your recordings. When you accept an update, the new installer is downloaded from GitHub, where Focal's releases are published. Turn the check off and nothing is fetched unless you press "Check for updates".

The speech model, downloaded once. The first time you make captions, Focal downloads a speech model of about 190 MB from the site where its makers publish it and keeps it in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Focal\models. Languages other than English need a second model of the same size.

Microsoft's web view component, during installation. Focal's windows run in Microsoft's web view component, which Windows 11 includes. Where it is missing, the installer downloads it from Microsoft.

What never leaves: your recordings, your audio, your camera, your captions, your edits, your cursor and keystroke data, and any count of how often you use Focal or what for. There is no telemetry, no usage statistics and no crash reporting. When something goes wrong, Focal shows you a message and writes to a log on your disk, with times, file paths, device names and sizes, never the recording or what you typed. So I hear about bugs the old-fashioned way, when someone writes to tell me, which is a fair price for never looking over your shoulder.

And since you are reading this on one: this website counts its visitors without cookies. What I see is totals, how many came, which pages they read and where from.

Captions without an upload

Automatic captions are where most people expect an upload, because many captioning services work that way: the audio goes to a server, including the part where you muttered at the build, and text comes back. In Focal the speech model runs on your computer, and your audio and your screen never leave it. It reads the words on screen as hints for names and terms, and that happens on your computer too.

After the one download, captions work with the network cable pulled. Correcting lines, saving an .srt and exporting a caption track stay on your computer as well. The steps are in how to add captions to a screen recording without uploading it.

The keystroke setting is the one real choice

Focal always records when keys are pressed, because that timing is how it places zooms around typing and lines the microphone up with the picture. What it keeps about which keys depends on the Keystrokes setting, and this is the one privacy decision Focal leaves to you.

Off, the default: only the timing of key presses. Nothing you type is recorded.
Shortcuts: key combinations such as Ctrl+C and the function keys, so they can show as a pill on the video. Plain typing is still timing only.
Everything: every key and all the text you type, passwords included. It is kept in the recording's input log whether or not the overlay shows it, so it travels with the recording.

The exported video shows only what the overlay showed. Pack a recording made with Everything into a .focalproj file, though, and the log goes with it, which is why Focal warns you before it exports such a project. Pick Shortcuts or Off before you record anything you would not want written into a file. Sooner or later everyone types a password with a recording running, usually while saying "ignore this part", and this setting decides whether the input log ignores it too.

Where the files are, and what uninstalling removes

Recordings go to Videos\Focal, or a folder you pick in Settings. Each one is a folder ending in .focal that holds the screen video, the microphone and system audio tracks, the camera video, the cursor and input log, the captions transcript, your edits, and, in its export folder, the videos you export. Deleting a recording in the Projects window moves it to the Recycle Bin. Settings, styles, export presets and the license file live in %APPDATA%\Focal.

Uninstall from Settings > Apps. The uninstaller removes the program, its Start Menu entry and its registry entries. With "Delete app data" checked, it also removes your settings, styles, export presets, the license file, logs, thumbnails, the downloaded speech models and saved window positions. It never touches your recordings: delete those yourself if you want them gone. Versions before 1.5.0, whose trial had a time limit, also kept the trial's start date in the registry, a date and nothing else, and their uninstaller left it there. The trial has no time limit now, so version 1.5.0 and later remove that date the first time they run. I would rather you read that here than find it in the registry editor one evening.

What this does not protect you from

"On your computer" moves the responsibility to you. Your disk, your backups and your sharing habits are the security now.

If your Videos folder is backed up to a cloud drive, your recordings go there with it. If that is not what you want, pick a different folder in Settings.
If your laptop is stolen, the recordings are as readable as everything else on its disk. An encrypted disk is the answer to that, not a screen recorder.
A .focalproj file is the whole recording: screen, voice, camera, captions and the input log, with every keystroke in it if you recorded with Everything. Share it as you would share the raw recording, because that is what it is.
Whatever was on screen is in the video, including the tab you forgot was open, which is never the tab you would have chosen. Close the inbox and the extra tabs before you press the shortcut, or record one window or a region instead of the whole monitor. In Chrome and Edge, a window recording can keep only the page.

That is how every file on your computer already works. The free trial has no time limit and needs no card and no account, and until you enter a license key the license check sends nothing at all.