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0.5.5
Beam 0.5.5 improves recording setup, automatic camera motion and editing responsiveness.
Recording
- Choose When I’m ready to prepare camera, microphone, system audio and recording settings before starting your countdown. Works with Studio and Instant in full-screen, window and region capture. Automatic start remains the default.
- The preparation bar stays on top, with native desktop blur on supported Windows/macOS systems and an opaque surface on Linux. Its device menus and Preferences remain accessible during setup.
- Disabled devices consistently use red crossed-out icons, with explicit No microphone and No system audio labels. New controls and explanations are translated into all fifteen languages.
- Windows screen recordings use an explicit H.264 profile and can select software encoding when accelerated Media Foundation initialization rejects the stream. Startup remains bounded and preserves the first image.
- Empty failed recordings show the original capture error instead of opening an undecodable video. Valid partial recordings remain available, and another recording can start immediately.
Camera and cursor
- Automatic zooms preserve opening clicks, complete drags and separate actions, with smoother entries, exits and connected pans.
- Camera follow anticipates recorded movement and starts progressively before the safe-zone edge, reducing catch-up pans and opening left-right swings. Existing generated zoom plans refresh while authored and locked zooms remain protected.
- Orbit is integrated into 3D zooms with eight illustrated presets, including a large pullback, and adjustable rotation, perspective, framing and follow controls.
- 3D framing preserves the full video, frame and shadow without unexpectedly multiplying low zoom levels. Gentler Dynamic angles and improved raster resolution help retain text readability.
- Improved cursor motion blur removes blocky halos during rapid dragging and resizing. Shared GPU accumulation and cached cursor artwork reduce repeated rendering work.
- 3D motion blur retains consistent shadow opacity and returns smoothly to flat framing. Lit 3D cursors include click contact.
- Cursor hover synchronization runs silently during normal operation and aligns fast hover changes with the footage. Hidden cursor intervals no longer leave settling trails.
- Manual zoom focus stays editable across repeated gestures inside its focus frame.
Editing and performance
- Faster timeline trimming, splitting, scrubbing and playback through reused media resources, shared frame evaluation, indexed lookups and less history/autosave copying.
- Playback retains long final frames and presents prefetched frames at their recorded timestamps across refresh rates and playback speeds.
- Software rendering and exports reuse camera scene preparation and cursor artwork, reducing unnecessary work without lowering output resolution or shutter sample counts.
- Pasting text, shapes, drawings, effects, images, video, audio, zooms or mixed selections at the end extends the project to fit them.
- Clicking the video editor background opens Canvas settings on the first press.
- Screenshot Composition stays above Properties and can dock in the title bar using a dashed drop preview, while keeping the project title centered. Docking and floating placement are remembered.
- Screenshot Properties and Composition share readable, subtly frosted surfaces in both themes, with matching header corners.
- Opening projects prioritizes your selected project location over stale copies in the default folder, including after changing drives or restarting Beam.
Builds include Windows x64/ARM64, macOS Apple silicon and Linux x64 packages.