Recording

Recording

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Record writes an MP4 of a region, a window, or a whole monitor. Video is encoded with Media Foundation (H.264 or H.265). Audio is AAC, mixed from the microphone and the system loopback onto the video clock. Frames come from the GPU desktop duplication path when Windows allows it, and fall back to GDI.

Before you start

On the capture bar, set the four chips. They apply to the next recording only. They are not saved as settings.

Chip	Default when the app opens	What it does
Microphone	On	Records the default recording device.
System audio	On	Records what Windows is playing, through a WASAPI loopback.
Webcam	Off	Picture-in-picture from the first camera. It opens during the countdown so the first frames are ready.
Cursor effects	On	Highlights the cursor and shows a ripple on clicks.

The chips stay labelled in English in every interface language.

Then choose quality under Settings → Recording. These values are saved, and the recorder uses them.

Setting	Default	Values
Frame rate	30 fps	1 to 120.
Codec	H.264	H.264, or H.265 (HEVC).
Output size	Native (as captured)	Native, 1080p, 1440p (2K), or 2160p (4K). The longer side is scaled to 1920, 2560, or 3840 and the aspect ratio is kept.

Above 1080p, screenIt asks Windows for a hardware encoder and falls back to a software encoder if that fails. Very large desktops are capped so the output stays within what the encoder accepts.

The microphone and system-audio checkboxes on that settings page are stored, but the chips on the capture bar are what the recording actually uses.

Start, pause, stop

1. Click Record.
2. Drag a region, click a window, or press Enter for the whole monitor. The region must be at least 16×16 pixels. Esc cancels.
3. A 3-2-1 countdown plays, then recording starts.
4. A small floating bar shows the elapsed time. Pause, resume, and stop are on that bar. It is excluded from the capture, so it does not appear in the video. Set the environment variable SCREENIT_TOOLBAR_IN_CAPTURE=1 before launch only if you intentionally want the bar in the recording.
5. Stop ends the file, adds it to the library, and opens it in the editor.

Cancelling during the countdown writes nothing.

You cannot take a still capture while a recording is running. The status line says to stop the recording first.

The file

Recordings are named like recording-<time>.mp4 in the same folder as captures (Pictures\screenIt by default). The status bar shows the duration and whether the file has an audio track, plus Show in folder.

In the editor:

Control	Result
Transport bar	Play, pause, and scrub.
Export frame	The current frame as a PNG, through a Save As dialog.
Export MP4	A copy of the recording, with its audio, to a path you choose.

Playback in the editor shows the picture. It does not play the audio track back through the speakers in this version.

Camera and picture-in-picture

With Webcam on, the camera is composited over the recording. The command channel can also set the shape (rectangle, rounded, circle), the corner, the margin, and the size as a percentage. The capture-bar chip uses the defaults. See Automation if you need a specific layout.

Editing the video file

Trim, cut, combine, animated GIF, and building a video from still images are engine commands (video.trim, video.cut, video.combine, video.gif, video.from_images). They are not buttons in 0.2.2. Trim re-encodes. There is no lossless cut in this version.

Next

Library and files · Settings and languages · Automation