Focal 1.0: screen recordings that look edited, without editing

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.