How to Record Your Screen in macOS

Last Update: November 16th, 2020
Article ID: 720746

Learn how to record your screen on macOS in this step-by-step tutorial. Screen captures are a quick and easy way to record your presentations, a new process, or even capture B-roll. No video editor software needed!

"Hi, this is Bob from Plugable Technologies. What I'd like to do today is give a quick demonstration of a handy feature built into macOS that allows you to take still image screenshots of things on your desktop or even record video of actions you take on your desktop. Now what I'm going to show you is only available for macOS version 10.14 Mojave and 10.15 Catalina.

So let's jump right in. To access this feature, you press the Shift, the Command key (⌘), and the 5 key on your keyboard and macOS brings up this little picker that allows you to pick which option you wish to use. If I hover over, these options by default saying that it's set to capture the entire screen.

Meaning if I click this capture button, it'll take a still image picture of everything on my desktop. I can change this to capture the selected window. For example, if I had a specific window open such as a browser or another application to just take a picture of that, or I can capture a selected portion of the screen by drawing a box around the area I wish to capture and dragging the handles to resize it as necessary.

So for example, if I wanted to take a screenshot of just what I've selected here and click the capture button, just a moment, I'll see a thumbnail image of that file that was created and in a moment that will disappear and it should show up as a file on my desktop. Well, that's pretty handy and we bring that back up: Shift + ⌘ + 5.

These options allow me to record the entire screen or record again a selected portion of the screen in a video. It even allows me using the options button to even pick a microphone to record audio along with this. Useful for say, recording demonstrations of certain tasks.

So, for example, if I click record now and say open up a web browser, I could demonstrate accessing a certain website and then when I was done, I can come up here and click the icon for the screen recording feature to stop it and it creates this thumbnail.

Again, if I click on this thumbnail, it actually lets me review a closed Firefox to get this out of the way, review the video I created so I can play it back, see the tasks that I was doing, but it also allows me to trim this and that if I click this button, it then brings up this small selection dialogue that allows me to cut portions off from the beginning of the video as well as at the end of the video and then click done and I've got the trimmed video for use later.

Hopefully, you find that useful and thank you for watching."