Focal 0.1.0

Sun, 01 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMT

First release.

Records a monitor, a window or a region without the cursor, with the microphone and system audio, through Windows Graphics Capture and the GPU's encoder. On NVIDIA GPUs recordings are HEVC and survive a crash.
Logs cursor movement, clicks and key timing so zooms and a crisp cursor are added when editing, not baked into the recording.
Editor with automatic zooms, trims, clip speed, backgrounds and aspect presets; exports run several times faster than real time.
Installs per user in seconds, checks for updates once a day and installs them in place.
Microphone and system audio are mixed sample for sample, with soft limiting when both are loud at once and dithered 16-bit output for the encoder.
Optional keystroke overlay: choose Shortcuts or Everything before recording and the keys you press appear as a pill at the bottom of the video, timed with your cuts and speed changes. Off by default, and nothing you type is stored unless you choose Everything.
Optional camera overlay: turn the camera on before recording and it shows in a corner of the video as a circle, a rounded square, or a wide or tall rectangle, in sync with your voice. A bubble in the same shape shows you the camera as soon as you switch it on and never appears in the video; the camera turns off when you cancel or the recording ends. Off by default.
Your voice lines up with the screen and the camera: Focal measures each microphone's delay from your typing while you record and corrects it, even with a fan running.
A very small selection grows to the smallest size Focal can record (256 x 144) instead of failing when the recording starts.
Audio interfaces: Focal records the input your microphone is on instead of averaging it with the empty one, so your voice is no longer 6 dB quieter.
A Projects window lists your recordings with thumbnails: open, rename, delete, or export one as a single .focalproj file to move or share, which Focal imports with a double-click. Edits save as you work, and the editor closes, saved, when you start a new recording.
Sped-up and slowed-down clips keep your voice at its normal pitch instead of going silent. Change pitch and Mute are still in the Audio tab.
System audio can leave out one app (a chat app's pings, say) or record only one app, chosen in Settings. Needs Windows 11.
Captions: Focal turns your voice into captions on your computer (leaving out the phrases speech models make up over typing and clapping), a phrase at a time, following your voice. It reads the screen for names and terms, so words like useEffect come out right. Correct any line in the editor, or save the captions as an .srt file. The speech model (190 MB) downloads the first time you make captions.
Edit by the transcript: select words in the captions list and cut them from the video, cut every "um" and "uh" in one click, or tighten long pauses (pauses where you click or type stay).
HDR monitors record with the colors you see: a monitor in HDR mode is captured in full and converted to SDR, so pages and apps look the same as in SDR mode and bright HDR highlights keep their color.
Record across monitors: drag a region from one screen onto the next and both parts record as one video.
Captions in other languages: pick the language (or let Focal detect it), or have any language written in English. Japanese and Chinese captions read without spaces. Other languages download a second speech model (190 MB) the first time.
Voice cleanup: remove background noise from your microphone, and even out its loudness so every video leaves at the level web video is mixed to. Two switches in the Audio tab.
Exports carry the captions as a track viewers can switch on in their player, in addition to (or instead of) captions drawn into the picture.
A recording stops by itself, keeping what it has, when the disk is nearly full or the window being recorded closes, and says why. It pauses while the computer sleeps, and the microphone and camera come back on their own after waking, or after being unplugged and plugged back in.
Captions run on your graphics card when you have a dedicated one: about three times faster on a fast desktop, more on laptops.
Motion blur on zooms and fast cursor moves, on by default, with its amount in the Zoom tab.
Styles: save a recording's look (background, padding, cursor, zoom feel, camera bubble, captions and more) by name, give it to any recording in one step, or have new recordings start with it.
Markers and chapters: press Ctrl+Alt+M while recording to mark a moment. Markers become chapters you can rename and add to; exports carry them so players can jump between them, and a click copies them as YouTube timestamps.
Administrator windows: Windows hides clicks and keys in a window run as administrator from Focal. Focal now says so before recording such a window, and the editor shows when one had focus, so missing zooms and keystrokes are explained.
Save, rename and Save as from the editor: Ctrl+S saves at once and the title bar shows when it last saved, F2 renames the project in place, and Save as copies it with your edits so far. A gear (Ctrl+,) opens Settings from any window.
Caption looks: six ready-made looks (Clean, Subtitle, Lines, Shorts, Karaoke and Minimal), or your own: any installed font or the Geist fonts that come with Focal, weight, case, colors, and a box, a box per line, an outline, a shadow or nothing behind the words. Captions can follow your voice by dimming the words ahead or coloring or boxing the one being spoken, show a few words at a time on one or two lines, sit at the top, middle or bottom, and fade or pop in. Subtitle files keep whole phrases.
Keystroke pills match your captions, or get a look of their own, and can sit along the top as well as the bottom.
Zoom editing: drag on the zoom lane or press Z to add a zoom, and K to add a keyframe that moves the focus or changes the zoom level, easing, gliding or cutting there. Pick a keyframe's focus by clicking the video, let a zoom follow the cursor, give it its own speed, or split, trim and nudge it; right-click the lane for more.
Automatic zoom waits for each click instead of drifting toward the next one, and you choose what starts a zoom: clicks, right clicks, other buttons, typing, shortcuts or scrolling. Zooms close together join into one that pans. Changing its settings updates the automatic zooms at once, and the ones you edit or delete stay that way.
Zoom speed: Slow, Smooth or Snappy, for every zoom or one at a time.
The camera bubble can have a border and a shadow, be any size, and be dragged anywhere in the preview.
Backgrounds: twelve ready-made ones, gradients of up to five colors, images blurred or shown whole, or the recording itself blurred behind it. An optional macOS or Windows title bar frames the recording like an app window.
Cursor: a halo or a spotlight that follows it, clicks shown as a ring, a dot or a pulse, and an optional click sound.
Background music under your recording that gets quieter while you talk.
Intro and end title cards, and chapter titles on screen as each chapter starts, in your captions' font and colors.
A logo in a corner of every frame. Styles carry it, and a style can be exported as a file, its images inside, to use on another computer.
Exports: presets for YouTube, Shorts and Reels, Instagram posts, smaller HEVC files and GIFs, plus your own; 4:5 and 21:9 shapes; and a file name pattern and export folder in Settings.
A privacy note and the third-party notices are installed with Focal and open from Settings. Exporting a project recorded with keystrokes set to Everything warns that the file carries all the text typed, passwords included.
The uninstaller's "Delete app data" now removes settings, styles, logs, thumbnails and the speech models as well. Recordings always stay.
Focal is free for 14 days from the first launch, with nothing held back. After that a license ($99 once, for one person on up to three computers, with a year of updates) is entered in Settings; recording, editing and exporting pause until then. A licensed copy works 14 days offline, and the version you have keeps working after its year of updates. The installer shows the license agreement, which Settings can open again.

Focal changelog

Focal 0.1.0