How to screen record on a Mac — with your camera and the Mac's own sound

The built-in way: Shift-Command-5

Every Mac has a screen recorder built into the system. It has no icon in the Dock and no application to open, which is why it is easy to miss.

1. Press Shift-Command-5. A small toolbar appears near the bottom of the screen.
2. Choose one of the two recording buttons on the right: record the entire screen, or record a selected portion. The screenshot buttons are on the left — a common mis-click.
3. For a portion, drag out the area you want. For the whole screen, click the display you mean.
4. Click Record. The toolbar disappears and a stop button appears in the menu bar.
5. Stop from that menu-bar button, or with Command-Control-Escape. The file saves to the Desktop unless you changed the destination.

The Options menu almost nobody opens

The same toolbar has an Options menu, and it holds the settings that decide whether the recording is usable.

• Microphone — off by default. This is the single most common reason a first Mac screen recording comes back silent.
• Save to — where the file goes. Desktop by default, which fills up quickly.
• Timer — a delay before recording starts, so you can get the screen into the state you want.
• Show Mouse Clicks — a ring around each click. Genuinely useful in a tutorial and off by default.

Where the built-in recorder stops

Three limits, and the second one surprises people who have only ever recorded on an iPhone.

• It cannot show your camera. There is no picture-in-picture, so a lesson recorded this way has no presenter in it.
• It has historically captured the microphone but not what the Mac itself is playing. A demo of an app with sound, or a video being discussed, comes back with your voice over silence — which is the whole reason virtual audio devices like BlackHole exist and get installed.
• It cannot leave a window out. Everything on the screen is in the recording, including the message that arrives mid-take.

The presenter setup

Reel records on Mac through ScreenCaptureKit, Apple's capture framework — the same route the system's own recorder and the major streaming tools take, so the quality and the performance are the platform's rather than a workaround's. The first recording asks for Screen Recording permission in System Settings → Privacy & Security; grant it once and it is done.

1. Open Reel and turn on Show Camera. On a Mac the camera starts in Floating Window mode: inside Reel's window, and drawn into the recording. For a separate window you can move anywhere, choose Pop-out Window in Settings → Camera → Mode and click Camera in the toolbar.
2. Place that window over the corner of the area you will record — or on a second display if it should not appear in the capture at all, which is the neat trick a Mac allows and a phone does not.
3. In Settings → General, choose the resolution and frame rate, and whether Reel's own window appears in the recording (Show this app in the recording).
4. Start and stop with ⌘R, or change the shortcut under Settings → Keyboard → Recording Shortcuts. It works while a Reel window — the main one or the camera pop-out — is the active window.
5. Turn the live preview on if you want to see what is being captured as it happens, or off to get the screen space back.

Audio on Mac, which is where most recordings go wrong

Microphone and system audio are separate levels here as they are on iOS. The difference worth knowing is how the Mac's own sound is captured: through ScreenCaptureKit's audio, so there is nothing to install. No virtual device, no Audio MIDI Setup, no aggregate device, no routing to rebuild after a macOS update breaks it.

Practically, that means the app you are demonstrating stays audible and your voice sits above it, and you set both before you start rather than discovering the balance afterwards.

The same protection applies as on iPhone: an app that marks its audio as protected — some streaming services do — is withheld from every recorder on the system, and no capture framework gets past that.

Keeping the notification out of the recording

Reel records one whole display, so whatever appears on it is in the file — a notification banner included. Turn on Do Not Disturb or a Focus before a take that matters, and move anything you would rather not show to another display or out of the way.

To record one app cleanly, make it full screen, or keep it on its own display and your notes on another: Reel records the display, not the window. Reel can leave its own window out of the recording with Show this app in the recording.

Files, and why a Retina recording is bigger than you expect

Recordings are written as MP4: a save dialog opens when you stop, and the file goes to the folder you pick there. Native resolution on a Retina display is large in a way that is easy to underestimate: a 5K screen produces files that grow fast enough to matter within a few minutes.

If the recording is going on the web, 1080p is almost always plenty, and it is the difference between a file you can send and a file you have to compress first. Native resolution is for footage you intend to crop into or keep as a master.

What each platform gets that the other does not

It is worth knowing which half of a workflow is where, because the two are not the same app with a different window.

Mac gets the floating and pop-out camera, system audio with nothing to install, 30, 60 or 120 fps, a record shortcut and the live preview. iPhone gets the picture-in-picture camera that travels between apps, and the in-app video player for recording a reaction to something — which is iOS only. On a Mac you play the clip in any player on the display you are recording instead.