How to screen record on a Mac

The shortcut

Press Shift, Command and 5 together. A floating toolbar appears with five buttons — three for screenshots, two for recording. Choose whether to capture the whole screen or a selected portion, then click Record.

Recent versions of macOS added a third option: record a specific window. Click the window you want after choosing that mode and only that window is captured, which is cleaner than drawing a rectangle by hand and avoids catching the edge of something else.

To stop, click the stop button in the menu bar, or press Command, Control and Escape.

QuickTime Player's File menu has a New Screen Recording option, and it opens exactly the same tool. Apple unified them years ago — there is one recorder with two doors, so it makes no difference which you use.

The options worth opening

Before recording, click Options on that toolbar. What is there decides whether the result is usable.

Microphone is off by default. If you intend to narrate, turn it on and pick your input — otherwise you will finish a ten minute walkthrough and discover it is silent.

Show Mouse Clicks marks each click with a dark circle. For anything instructional this is the difference between a viewer following along and a viewer guessing where you clicked.

Timer gives you a few seconds before recording begins, which is enough to close the toolbar and get to a clean starting point.

Save Location defaults to the Desktop. Worth changing if you record often, because Retina recordings accumulate quickly and the Desktop is a poor place for them.

Why there is no system audio

This is the single most searched problem in the topic, and the answer is unsatisfying: the built-in recorder captures your microphone and nothing else. The sound coming out of your Mac — a video playing, a call, a game — is not recorded.

It is a deliberate design decision rather than an oversight, and it has not changed. Recording a video call or a streaming service by capturing the audio would raise problems Apple has chosen not to invite.

The traditional workaround is a virtual audio device such as BlackHole. It creates a fake output that your Mac sends sound to, which the recorder can then treat as an input. It works, and it requires configuring a Multi-Output device in Audio MIDI Setup so you can still hear what you are recording. That configuration is where most people give up.

The alternative is a recorder that handles system audio itself. OBS is free and does this, at the cost of a heavier setup than pressing a keyboard shortcut.

Recent macOS versions split the permission in two: screen recording and system audio recording are now granted separately in System Settings. If a third-party recorder captures picture but no sound, check both toggles rather than assuming the app is broken.

Permission problems

Any application that records the screen needs explicit permission, granted in System Settings under Privacy and Security. Applications must be restarted after being granted it — enabling the toggle while the app is running frequently changes nothing until it is relaunched.

Recent versions also re-prompt periodically for apps holding this permission. It is not a fault and nothing has been revoked; macOS simply asks you to confirm you still want a program watching your screen.

If an app is not listed at all, there is usually a plus button to add it manually.

The file size problem nobody mentions

Mac screens are dense, and the recorder captures them at full resolution. A five minute recording on a Retina display can comfortably exceed half a gigabyte, and a long tutorial runs into several.

Recordings also save as MOV rather than MP4. That is fine on Apple hardware and causes friction everywhere else — Windows machines, Android phones, older editors and a good number of upload forms will either refuse the file or open it without sound.

Converting to MP4 is usually instant, because the video is repackaged rather than re-encoded, using MOV to MP4.

For getting a long recording under an email or chat limit, use the video compressor.

Recordings at Retina resolution can be halved with no legibility lost, using change resolution.

Screen recordings compress remarkably well — far better than camera footage — because most of the frame sits perfectly still between frames, and stationary areas cost a compressor almost nothing.

Recording for a specific destination

A bug report or a support ticket wants something short that plays inline, and a video file frequently will not.

For a few seconds of interaction, a GIF is the format that autoplays anywhere, made with video to GIF.

For a walkthrough going onto YouTube or into documentation, keep the MP4 but trim it. Nobody watches the thirty seconds at the start where you were finding the right window.

Cut the recording down to what matters with the video trimmer.

When the built-in tool is not enough

It has real limits. No system audio, no webcam overlay, no scenes, no control over quality or frame rate, and no pausing mid-recording.

If you need any of those, OBS is the free answer and handles all of them. The trade is a setup session rather than a keyboard shortcut, which is worth it for anything you will do repeatedly and overkill for a one-off clip.

Common questions