Record your screen, with or without your camera

Rooster records your screen into a project, so a walkthrough or tutorial is ready to edit by its transcript as soon as you stop. The screen modes use a small floating recorder rather than the editor window, so the editor never appears in the shot.

Start a screen recording

1. Choose File > Record > Screen, or Screen + Camera to put yourself in the corner. You can also open the recorder with ⌘R and pick the mode from its menu.
2. Choose what to record from the source chips (see below).
3. Press the record button or Space (Space). The countdown runs, then recording starts.
4. Press it again to stop.

The first time you record your screen, macOS has to allow it, and it does not ask. See Allow Screen Recording.

Choose a display or a window

The recorder has three source chips: camera, microphone and display. Click the display chip to choose:

• Entire display, or another display if you have more than one.
• One app's window, listed by app and window name. Recording a window records that window alone, wherever it moves.
• Refresh app windows if a window you just opened is not in the list.

Rooster leaves its own windows out of a screen recording, including the recorder and the camera window. The teleprompter is left out too, unless you turn on Show teleprompter in recording in its settings.

Sound and the pointer

On the recorder's settings page, behind its gear button (Recorder settings):

• Record Mac audio records the sound your Mac plays, alongside your microphone.
• Show pointer keeps the mouse pointer in the recording.
• Format and Quality set the shape and size of the recording.

Add your camera

In Screen + Camera, a small window showing your camera floats over your screen from the moment you press record. Drag it where you want it and drag its edges to resize it. It is not burned into the screen recording: Rooster records the camera as a file of its own, and puts it where the window was when you stopped.

In the project, the camera sits on its own lane called Camera, above the screen recording, lined up with it. Because it is a layer of its own, you can still move it, resize it or hide it after recording.

Recording a single window works the same way: the camera still becomes a layer of its own, and it opens in the top right of the window's picture.

Where the take goes

With a project open, the take is added to it at the playhead, unless you choose New project from the recorder's destination menu. With no project open, it becomes a new project. Rooster transcribes it when Transcribe when recording ends is on, which it is unless you turned it off.

The files are saved to Downloads > Rooster, unless you chose another folder. See Where Rooster saves recordings and exports.