Support

One to record: Screen Recording (the footage). Two more make the edit better, and you can grant them any time from Settings → General: Input Monitoring (typing and scrolling are seen, so they are sped up and framed) and Accessibility (zooms land on the exact button you clicked). Without them, clicks are still tracked and zooms follow the pointer. Grant each in System Settings → Privacy & Security. A fourth, Microphone, is optional and only asked for when you turn narration on. The privacy page explains how each one is used.

macOS applies the Screen Recording grant to newly launched apps. Quit and reopen Capta once after granting; the permission screen has a Relaunch button for this.

macOS sometimes adds Capta to the Input Monitoring list without showing a dialog. The button opens System Settings at the right pane; flip the Capta toggle there and the app picks it up within a second or two.

Yes. Every feature is free: no watermark, no account, no trial, no subscription. The download is a 52.4 MB notarized DMG.

No. Capta is built for Apple silicon (M1 and later) and needs macOS 14 or later. It does not run on Intel Macs.

Yes. Right-click the zoom bar, choose Aim at a Point…, and click the picture where it should look. You can also drag a bar to move it, stretch its edge to hold it longer, right-click for the level, or click a bar and nudge it with the arrow keys; Delete removes it. Double-click the zoom lane to add one.

Move the playhead to the start and press ⌥I, to the end and press ⌥O, then ⌥⌫. The footage, the voice and the captions go together. The filmstrip's right-click menu has the same three. If you narrated, you can also select words in the Voice tab and press Delete.

No. Voice → Replace… fixes a word across the whole transcript at once, in the timed words too, so captions and cuts follow. ⌘Z undoes it.

Style → Save Current Look… keeps the backdrop, frame, logo, pointer, captions, cards and export settings as a preset you can apply to any recording. To compare two looks on the same take, Duplicate it (⌘D): the copy costs no disk space until something changes.

Yes. Settings → General → Storage → Move Library… moves every recording, export and preview cache to the folder you pick, an external drive included. Exports can go to a folder of their own from the Export dialog.

⌥⌘R opens the capture panel from anywhere and stops the take; ⌥⌘5 records the window in front at once. You can also use the menu-bar icon or the buttons in the app. While recording, a floating Stop pill sits at the bottom of your screen.

Prefer Capta's own Stop over the one inside macOS's screen-sharing pill; the system button ends the stream on macOS's side first and adds an extra step.

In ~/Movies/Capta, one folder per recording, next to each exported MP4. They also show up in Spotlight if you search "capta".

Yes. The preview applies your changes live: switch backgrounds, adjust zoom intensity and pacing, trim on the filmstrip, drag or stretch any zoom, and toggle individual zoom moments off. Export bakes the final file whenever you are happy.

Drop any audio file onto a recording, or pick one of the three built-in tracks or a Creative Commons track from the online search. Capta detects the tempo on-device and nudges cut points onto the beat in silent demos. When you narrate, speech timing takes priority over beat snapping. Volume, click sounds, and whooshes live in Settings → Sound.

Yes. Turn Mic or Camera on in the capture panel before you start. The camera appears as a bubble in a corner, in one of eight shapes, or in a column on the left or right of the video that stays in view while the screen zooms; mirror, zoom, lighting and background blur are in the Webcam tab. Capta transcribes narration on your Mac into captions and steers cuts around your sentences. Pick the devices in Settings.

MP4 or GIF, or straight to the clipboard. Any of 16:9, vertical or square, up to 4K at 60 fps. Share copies the export into your own iCloud Drive and gives you a view-only link.

Yes. Open the recording and switch the editor from Video to Guide (⇧⌘G). Each click becomes a numbered screenshot with the control boxed and a sentence under it; typing, shortcuts and long scrolls get steps of their own. Edit a sentence, choose the frame before or after the click, hide or merge steps, and black out anything private. Export guide writes a PDF, Markdown with a folder of PNGs, a web page, or rich text for the clipboard, or pushes it into Hudu. Every format is free. The guide walkthrough has the five steps.

Settings › Integrations takes your Hudu address and an API key that may create knowledge base articles and uploads; the key is kept in your login keychain. In the guide's Export tab, pick a company or the global knowledge base and press Push to Hudu. Capta creates the article with the pictures attached and opens it; pushing again updates the same article.

No. Recording, the automatic zooms and cuts, music sync and export work on any supported Mac. When Apple Intelligence is enabled, Capta can also write titles and social posts, pick the key moment and title chapters. When it is not available, those features use a plain non-AI version or switch off. You can also download a small Qwen3 model once and let it write titles and chapters on any supported Mac; see what needs what.

No. Recording, analysis, transcription and rendering run on your Mac, and Capta has no account system. On its own it sends only anonymous usage events: which steps are used and where they fail, never recordings, file names or anything you type, and Settings → General → Share anonymous usage data turns them off. Everything else is something you trigger: Check for Updates fetches a single version file, online music search sends your search words to Openverse, and Share copies a video into your own iCloud Drive; Help → Report an Issue… opens a SnagFrog report form with versions, permissions and technical settings, never recordings or file paths. Weekly update checks are opt-in; caption transcription may first download Qwen or Apple speech models. The privacy page lists every one of them.

Yes. The Stop pill has a Pause button, and ⌥⌘P pauses or resumes from any app (change it under Settings → Shortcuts). Paused time is not in the video: the footage, your voice, the camera and the click track all pick up where they left off.

After you stop, a line under the preview says what is still running: framing your clicks, transcribing narration, naming chapters. When it goes away the take is ready, and if you have switched to another app a notification tells you.

Capta → Check for Updates. A newer version offers Install and Relaunch: Capta downloads the notarized DMG from capta.cam, checks its checksum and its Developer ID signature, replaces itself and reopens. Your recordings and settings stay where they are. You can also tick "Check for updates weekly" there, which fetches one version file a week and nothing else.

An orange dot on the Export button means the file on disk predates your latest settings. Export again to refresh it. Title and end cards appear only in the exported file; the editor and export sheet show how much time they add. Share and Copy Video require the current edit to be exported first.

Capta relies on each app's accessibility data, and a few apps (some Electron ones in particular) report poor element frames. Capta falls back to cursor-centered zooms there. You can also switch any zoom off in the moments list. Reports of misbehaving apps are welcome at the address below.

macOS 14 or later on an Apple silicon Mac. The app is signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple.

Both add automatic zooms and a smoothed cursor to a screen recording. Capta also cuts dead air, speeds up typing, syncs cuts to music in silent demos of a music track and captions your narration, all on-device, and it is free, with no watermark and no account. Screen Studio is a paid app with a fuller manual editor. The comparison page covers Screen Studio, Loom and CleanShot X side by side.