Recording the Camera
Recording yourself along with the screen, and what you can do with the camera afterward.
Screenflick can record a video camera along with the screen. You can use the built-in camera, an external webcam, or even a DSLR (with an appropriate system plugin). You decide how the camera looks while you record, and you decide again when you export, where you can put it on top of the screen recording or save it as a separate movie.
Choosing a Camera #
In the Record view, turn on "Record Camera" and choose the camera from the pop-up menu below it.
macOS also needs to have given Screenflick permission to use the camera. See Permissions.
To use your iPhone as the camera, use the iPhone camera feature built into macOS 13 and later. The "Screenflick Camera" iOS app is turned off by default, but you can turn it back on in the Remote view of Screenflick's preferences.
The Camera Preview #
Click the eye button next to the camera pop-up menu to open the Camera Preview window. It floats on top of everything else on the screen and shows what the camera sees, so you can check how you look before you start recording and while you're recording.
You can drag the window anywhere you like, such as off to the side of the area you're recording, so you can see yourself while you work.
Capture in Recording #
The Camera Preview window has a "Capture in Recording" setting. It decides whether the window itself shows up in the recording of your screen.
| Capture in Recording | What happens |
|---|---|
| On | The camera appears in the screen recording, right where you put the window, as you record. You and the people who watch the movie see the same thing. This is how it starts out. |
| Off | You can see the camera on your screen, but it isn't in the recording of the screen. The camera is still recorded separately, so you can put it wherever you want when you export, or use it in a video editor. |
Turn it off if you only want the preview for yourself, or if you'd rather decide where the camera goes after you've seen the recording.
How the Camera Looks #
The preview window has the same choices for how the camera looks as the Export view does:
| Option | Choices |
|---|---|
| Cropping | "Natural" (the whole camera image), "Square Crop", or "Circle Crop". |
| Background | "Keep" the background behind you, "Darken" it, or "Remove" it. Removing the background works best when it's a fairly solid color. This needs macOS 12 Monterey or later. |
| Flip Horizontally | Flips the camera image from left to right, like a mirror. |
Putting the Camera on the Exported Movie #
Even if the camera wasn't part of the screen recording, you can put it on top of the exported movie. In the Export view, select a recording that has a camera and open its camera options. Turn on "Show camera in recording", and choose how it looks:
| Option | What it does |
|---|---|
| Position | Where the camera goes on the video: Top Left, Top, Top Right, Left, Right, Bottom Left, Bottom, or Bottom Right. |
| Size | How big the camera is compared to the video. |
| Distance | How far the camera is from the edge of the video. |
| Flip horizontally, cropping, and background | The same choices as in the preview: "Natural", "Square Crop", or "Circle Crop", and "Keep", "Darken", or "Remove" for the background. |
These choices belong to each recording, so you can export the same recording with the camera in different places, or without the camera at all. The choices you make are also used for the next recording you make. To copy the settings from one recording to another, right-click on the recordings in the sidebar.
Exporting the Camera Separately #
You don't have to put the camera on the screen recording at all. The "Camera Only" export makes a movie of just the camera. Choose "Camera Only" in the export panel and pick a file type, either QuickTime (.mov) or MPEG-4 (.mp4). You can include the microphone audio too. If you do, audio from different devices stays on separate tracks instead of being mixed together into one stereo track.
The movie uses the recording's trimming and the microphone audio delay. It's handy if you want to edit the camera video in a video editor, apart from the screen.
See Exporting Movies.