Alex SaintBack to @alexsssaint

RecordLab

macOS 14+·SwiftUI·no accounts

Record raw. Decide later.

Nothing cinematic is baked into the capture. The screen, the camera and the cursor are recorded straight, and every zoom, crop, backdrop and tilt is a decision you make afterwards, non-destructively, and can take back.

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The RecordLab editor: a screen recording in the player with a rounded camera bubble in the corner, the timeline and its waveform underneath, and the camera inspector open on the right.
The RecordLab editor on a recording made while writing this page. The camera bubble, its size, corner radius and shadow, and the green-screen switch are all edit-time settings: none of it was baked into the capture.

Instead of Screen Studio

What RecordLab is

RecordLab captures the screen at 4K60 in HEVC with optional system audio, the camera and microphone alongside it, and a 60 Hz log of where the cursor was and when it was clicked. The cursor is hidden in the capture on purpose: it gets drawn back in the edit, at the right size, in the right place.

The editor works in parts. Split the timeline, remove a part without destroying it, then give each part its own framing, speed, camera look and background. Values interpolate between parts, so a zoom is a move rather than a jump.

It is a SwiftUI app with no dependencies. No account, no project cloud, no upload step. Sessions land in your Movies folder as ordinary files.

It replaces Screen Studio, and the subscription under it.

Capabilities

What it does

  • 4K60 capture

    ScreenCaptureKit into an asset writer, at native pixels, in HEVC, with optional system audio. Full display or a picked window.

  • Camera and mic

    One capture session for both preview and recording. It auto-selects an Osmo Pocket 3 in webcam mode and a Shure mic. A microphone with no camera records audio alone.

  • Cursor, tracked at 60 Hz

    Positions and clicks are stamped on the host clock and rebased onto the first frame of the video, so ripples and auto zooms land where you actually clicked.

  • Parts, not razor cuts

    Split, restore, remove, and per-part framing, speed, mute and camera settings. Removal is non-destructive: the footage is still there.

  • The look

    Auto zoom, motion blur, green-screen removal, padded colour, gradient, wallpaper or image backdrops with blur and grain, and a bordered screen card you can tilt in 3D.

  • Preview that keeps up

    The same compositor drives the live preview and the export, so what you scrub is what you get. Out comes an MP4, or a short GIF.

Where your material goes

One machine, and it is yours

On this Mac

0 crossings

  • The screen recording
  • The camera track
  • The microphone track
  • The cursor and click log
  • Every edit you make
  • The export

The line

Nothing does. No account, no upload, no telemetry.

No account to make, no project to upload, nothing phoning home. The files sit in ~/Movies/RecordLab, in formats anything else on the Mac can open, and they are yours.

How it works

The pipeline, as built

Record phase

Straight, and nothing else

  • screen.mov

    4K60 HEVC, native pixels, cursor hidden

  • camera.mov

    or mic.m4a when there is no camera

  • cursor.json

    60 Hz samples, every click stamped

Edit phase

Every cinematic decision, later

  • parts

    split, remove, restore. Nothing is destroyed

  • look

    framing, speed, backdrop, camera, per part

  • compositor

    one Core Image pass drives preview and export

The cursor is hidden in the capture and drawn back in the edit, which is why a zoom can follow a click that happened before you decided to zoom.

Requirements

What it runs on

SpecDetail
RequiresmacOS 14 or newer.
PermissionsScreen Recording is required. Camera and microphone are optional and fall back to screen only. Accessibility enables the global click log.
Capture4K60 HEVC, native pixels, optional system audio, cursor hidden and redrawn in the edit.
Session folder~/Movies/RecordLab/Session-*: screen.mov, camera.mov or mic.m4a, cursor.json, session.json.
ExportMP4 at full size or 1080p, or a short GIF.
Tests65 unit tests over the timeline maths, the settings decoding and the session model.

Honest

Not there yet

  • A camera, a microphone and a real export cycle are hardware tests, so they are checked by hand rather than claimed from a synthetic run.
  • The Osmo Pocket 3 streams up to 4K30 as a webcam. For its full 4K60 look, record on the Osmo and drop the file into the session folder as camera.mov: the editor picks it up like any other camera track.

Status

Open source, and on the store

RecordLab is being opened up. The repository is private today, so there is nothing to clone yet and no public build to download. When it opens it will be at github.com/AlexSSSaint/RecordLab, under a licence that lets you read it, build it and keep it.

The Mac App Store version is coming after that, so it installs and updates like anything else on your Mac, without a certificate dance. No date, because a date I have not earned is just a way of being wrong later.

Want it the day it ships?

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