Why Focal records your screen without the cursor

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.