“how to do screen recordings with zoom and panning”
Summary of results
I would use OBS with some added plugin [0] to allow zooming on your cursor with a hotkey.
From the linked video, I saw video panning with mouse movement and zoom-to-clicks ... I think Camtasia can do those? For sure on the zoom, less sure on the panning. Camtasia is commercial and cross-platform.
Added benefit is that I think Camtasia is relatively easy to pickup compared to other tools I've tried to use.
While working on product demos, I couldn't find a screen recording tool that produced engaging video demos easily. A popular tool was Screen Studio [1], but it's still only available for Mac.
I wanted a simple way to record professional-looking video demos without spending too much time editing them. So I built ScreenDemos, a browser extension that lets you record your screen with zoom effects, augmented cursor and smooth mouse movement applied automatically as you record. No extra software, no editing required.
I originally built it to streamline my own workflow, but it turned out to be pretty useful, so I'm sharing it here. Let me know what you think!
[1] Show HN: Screen Studio. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34045110
Correct, this is it! It's basically a blend of screen recording and AE. The recording is made and then the software smoothes cursor movements and creates the zoom effects.
Yeah just record the whole screen and zoom in on the relevant section in your video editor. If you’re not looking for anything fancy in terms of transitions, that’ll be a rather straightforward edit.
If you’re on a 1080p monitor, just due to the resolution you’d be zooming into, it may end up being easier to just switch between full screen windows and cut the transitions
Does anyone know tools that can capture high quality screen recordings from a browser session? Thinking about the type of video that has lots of dramatic pans and zooms + smooth cursor movement used in marketing videos. I feel like I came across a tool that could do this but can’t find it now / might have been my imagination.
I want to ideally press a hotkey and have the recording zoom into the area of the screen I'm interacting with the mouse, then hotkey to zoom back out to see the full application.
Totally irrelevant on the subject, but the screen recording in the article caught my attention: what tool does one use to create the screen recording with zoom and mouse tracking?
On Mac: Quicktime + iMovie.
Quicktime has a very simple/flexible screen recorder built in. You can record a section of your screen, or full screen. If you make a mistake, pause for 5 seconds and then just do a re-take on the fly.
Import the QT recording into iMovie. Clip out of the unwanted sections and export your video.
If you're on a Mac, you can just use QuickTime Player.
File -> New Screen Recording
I think it does pretty well with movement on the screen. Just remember that "stop" is Cmd-Ctrl-Esc!
Modern-ish macOS has a built-in screen recorder. Try pressing Cmd+Shift+5
My main work machine is also a Mac and I found the accessibility zoom a really useful and quick feature. I simply share my entire screen or a window in whatever meeting/share app and then use a 3-finger gesture and Cmd+ or Cmd- to zoom in and out. That zoom level is fully passed on by the screen share.
Obviously this feature has to be enabled and wasn’t intended for this purpose but it works perfectly!
For that you need to use screen magnification.
Triple tap with three fingers to zoom in and zoom out. While you're zoomed, drag with three fingers to pan the view.
But I also kinda feel like just saying that says a lot about Apple's UX these days, especially in the accessibility department. Because those swipe gestures can be confusing and require too much manual dexterity for many people who need a feature like screen magnification.
Zoom has this as a built-in feature -- you can share just a region you specify of your whole display. Share screen -> advanced -> "portion of screen"
Zoom lets you share a region of your screen if you click the advanced tab when sharing.
OK, I have a series of steps you can follow:
- Start DeskPad
- Go to System Settings and set the resolution of the virtual display to 1920x1080 (just to be a standard size/resolution and not retina, saves on resources and hassle)
- Still in System Settings, set Accessibility Zoom to render a magnified version on the virtual display:
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/zoom-in-on-whats-on....
- Resize the DeskPad window to be a nice little preview on the corner of your screen.
- Start your call, share the virtual display (which will be the zoomed version of what you are pointing at with your mouse)
Quick PSA: If you want to do a facecam-overlayed screen recording on a Mac, all you need is QuickTime.
1. QuickTime -> New Movie Recording
2. View -> Float on Top
3. Position face view where you want it to be.
4. Hit Cmd+Shift+5 to record the entire screen.
Voilà!
Thanks for the recommendations, I'll take a look at them.
For PIP I simply used Quicktime (the one that comes with Mac). I opened a "New Movie Recording", but didn't hit record. Then I resized the window and put it where I want. Finally, I open a "New Screen Recording" that captures a 1080p portion of my window. So, Quicktime is recording itself.
I also tried this with recording turned on in both windows, and it works fine. That would allow me to switch back and forth between screen and face in editing, if I wanted to.
On Linux for screen recording I use Peek and I really like the approach
You just resize Peek‘s transparent window over the part of the screen that you want and hit record
On Linux you can just use "SimpleScreenRecorder". It allows recording video of a single window (with audio from mic). I use it at work to create demos. My video demos are better than most others' because the video does not contain the whole screen (unlike many other demos) and my videos are accompanied by audio narration so demo can be watched independently later. Mac users often ask me how I create my demo videos.
If you have a mac, buy Compressor app from Apple set up Folder watch, use Zoom to start an empty video meeting to show video of yourself, minimize(shift cmd m) and float(cmd alt f) the zoom window, then use MacOS screen record(cmd shift 5) to record.
I can get this screen grab setup up running in 10 seconds. You don’t need Loom for most cases
How is screen recording only of Zoom itself of any use to you?
every screen recording app is doing auto-zoom, it's just one way highlight contents and get viewers' attention. there should be more way to highlight and get more attentions for screen recording!
check auto-zoom+spotlight+lightbox in https://screenbuddy.xyz/
suggest me any other approaches to highlight
When it works with Zoom screen sharing
iirc zoom has some features like annotation that only work over a "screenshare" as it understands them, and not on other surfaces.
it's possible to go one step further with OBS, take your capture camera and open a "windowed projector" and just share that window with zoom. then you have a window with a view manipulable from within OBS but zoom understands it as a screen capture too.
zooming and panning is often easier, particularly if a website is hijacking scrolls and slowing them down, doing scroll snapping, etc.
This solves the missing mouse panning button. You can zoom-in, move mouse somewhere else, zoom-out and voilà, panning happened.
Screen sharing is much easier over zoom. Others can add annotations too.
On macOS, screen recording: https://imgur.com/a/HCcUPC1
Pinch zoom and two finger scrolling worked for me on Mac. Presumably mouse wheel on a mouse, perhaps combined with shift/ctrl/option/command for horizontal zooming. Holding space is often used for panning (thanks Photoshop), so give that a try too.
Like this?
Zoom in up to 1.5x and pan always at center of picture (not tested):
import ffmpeg
(
ffmpeg
.input(
'\*.jpg',
pattern_type='glob',
framerate='1/5'
)
.zoompan(
z='min(zoom+0.0015,1.5)',
d=700,
x='in_w/2-(in_w/zoom/2)',
y='in_h/2-(in_h/zoom/2)'
)
.output('output.mp4', pix_fmt='yuv420p')
.run()
)
stitching [0], [1], and [2]
[0]https://github.com/kkroening/ffmpeg-python#quickstart
[1]https://kkroening.github.io/ffmpeg-python/#ffmpeg.zoompan
[2]https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#Examples-133
EDIT: added options for slideshow style
Congrats on launching. Can you add an auto-zooming feature like https://screen.studio
Many screen recordings are now consumed on mobile, and it's difficult to see details without zooming.
I tried doing this on Windows with OBS, and got it working with a Python script but it was painful.
I use screen recorders all the time. Question: what format does it capture in? Some screen recorders capture as mov files, which get janky in high zoom. A pro app like Camtasia captures in what I assume is the raw screen data, and for this reason zooming in on a clip works really well.
seems to be done in the same way, but the parameters are off. aswd (camera angle) + arrow keys(panning) works nicely when zoomed out but very sensitive when zoomed in.
Good suggestion, unfortunately that zooms the entire screen including the recording software so it's not exactly usable for the types of recordings I want to do. Ideally I want to zoom in on just part of the active window.
evince (linux) does Zoom with Ctrl + Scroll, maybe yours does too? I don't think it has Pan, but I'm keyboard-heavy and use horizontal scroll with Shift + Scroll.
What do you mean by real-time? Do you want your screen to zoom while you are recording? Or do you mean that you want the zooming to happen automatically?
I can't seem to pan, it would be nice if the zooming would zoom in to the mouse location. (I did manage to write HI near the left edge though.)
From the samsung S10 forward, this is a feature while recording video in zoom mode. I was always really curious how they did it.
I liked how zooming and panning in one pane was automatically refkected in the other, nice.
If all you need is screen recording, as per your parent, and you're on windows the default screenshot tool (Win + Shift + S) does screen recording.
You can’t take a screenshot is different than Zoom not being able to.
You basically can take screenshots/record your screen in every major wayland compositor. On the other hand, screen recording by applications require interfacing with pipewire, which is pretty much done by many programs (including chrome (and thus electron), firefox, obs, etc), but plenty electron apps do not use the necessary flag.
If you don’t want to tinker with rebuilds I recommend using the web version of zoom in an up-to-date browser.
I've gotten away with simply firing up OBS and "screen sharing" the virtual camera. Has worked fine on Zoom and Slack huddles, with the added benefit of giving me other things that OBS can provide: easy recording, scenes, text, source management, plugins, etc. For a casual conversation it's somewhat overkill, but when you're doing something more serious or formal, or need to switch between a keynote/Powerpoint and a screen share, or a video capture device, it's wonderful, and actually rather easy to get going in.
and adds screen recording functionality as a video
Zathura does that under Linux, with the difference that zoom is achieved with Ctrl instead of Alt. Right-Click dragging = pan.
One feature I absolutely love is that Page Down goes to the top of the next page. It's very practical when you want to skim something quickly, with a zoom level that doesn't fit a page size perfectly.