A Mac screen is wide; a phone is tall. Four steps from a normal 16:9 recording to a 9:16 clip where the action stays in the frame and the captions sit where phones show them.
The usual way to make a vertical clip from a screen recording is to crop the middle of the screen and hope the interesting part was there. Capta knows where the interesting part is, because it watched your clicks: with the canvas filled, the camera follows the pointer between zooms and lands on what you clicked. This guide uses the sample take so you can try it before recording anything; every step is the same on your own recording.
Press Export and choose Reels / TikTok / Shorts from the Preset menu: a 9:16 canvas at 1080×1920, 30 frames a second, balanced quality, and Crop to fill switched on so the recording fills the tall frame instead of sitting as a small card on a background. Close the dialog; the preview is already vertical.
The same preset appears in the Canvas tab as Vertical with Crop to fill. Square works the same way for a feed post.
Play it once. Where a wide shot used to show the middle of the screen, it now centres on the pointer, held inside the frame; zooms land on the button or field you clicked, as before. If one zoom looks at the wrong element, right-click its bar, choose Aim at a Point… and click the picture where it should look. A stretch you do not want: ⌥I, ⌥O, ⌥⌫.
Open Voice → Caption look. Phones cover the bottom of a vertical video with their own controls, so choose Top, or keep them at the bottom and raise the Size; the Bar style reads best over a busy screen. A Pill at 1.3× is a good default. The captions burn into the export; the subtitle file is unaffected.
Press Export. Save Poster gives you the cover frame, and the Cards tab has the post written for you, with the chapter list and the music credit if you used a Creative Commons track. Drag the Export button straight into the app you post from.
For a landing page or YouTube, switch the preset back; nothing else changes. The vertical crop is a canvas choice, not an edit.
The sides of a 16:9 screen are outside a 9:16 frame, so yes, but the camera keeps the pointer and every clicked element inside it. If a wide shot still cuts something you need, add a zoom at that moment and aim it.
Yes. Exports are named for the recording and numbered when they collide, so a wide and a vertical export sit side by side. Duplicate the recording (⌘D) if you want different edits for the two.
One shortcut to record, one click to export.