What to make with Capta

Capta is a free macOS screen recorder that turns one take into a finished video. These are the four things people make with it most, each in three steps.

A product demo for your landing page

The hero video on a launch page has to be short, sharp and re-made every time the UI changes. With Capta the re-make is one more recording, because the zooms, pacing and music are computed from what you did, not hand-placed.

1. Stage the app. Open it on a clean desktop with the data you want on screen. Press ⌥⌘R to open the capture panel, pick a window or area and turn the mic on if you will narrate.
2. Walk through the flow once. Show the product the way you would show a friend. Pauses, mistyping and loading spinners come out in the edit, so do not restart for small slips.
3. Pick a look and export. Stop with ⌥⌘R. Choose a background, drop in a music track for beat-synced silent demos or ducked music under narration, add a title card, then export as 16:9 MP4 up to 4K, or press Share for a view-only iCloud link.

The demo on the Capta homepage was made this way, with Capta recording itself.

Release-note and changelog videos

A twenty-second clip of the new feature beats three paragraphs describing it, and it is the kind of thing that never gets made when it needs an editor. Capta makes it a habit instead of a project.

1. Record the feature, narrating if you like. Say what changed while you click through it. Capta transcribes on your Mac and burns in captions, and keeps the cuts away from your sentences.
2. Let Apple Intelligence title it. One click writes the title card and a short post from what happened on screen, using the names of the elements you clicked, never the text you typed.
3. Export a GIF or MP4. GIFs drop straight into a GitHub release or a README; MP4 goes into the announcement post. Both come out of the same recording.

Bug reports and support replies

"Here is exactly what I did" is the most useful sentence in a bug report, and a recording says it better than a list of steps. The automatic zoom on each click also shows the reader which control was pressed.

1. Reproduce the bug with ⌥⌘R. Turn on keystroke chips in Settings if the keys matter; they are off by default.
2. Trim to the moment. Drag the trim handles on the filmstrip so the clip starts just before the problem.
3. Copy to the clipboard. Export straight to the clipboard and paste into the issue tracker or the support thread. For a long recording, Share gives you an iCloud link instead.

The recording never leaves your Mac unless you paste or share it, which matters when the bug involves customer data.

Step-by-step guides and SOPs

The same recording that makes the demo video makes the written guide. Every click is already on the event track, so the numbered screenshots and their sentences exist before you open the Guide view.

1. Record the task with ⌥⌘R. A desktop app, a remote desktop session or a browser tab; click the controls you mean and pause before the important ones.
2. Switch to Guide and read it through. Fix a sentence, pick the frame before or after a click, hide a step that is noise, black out a customer name on one still.
3. Export where it needs to go. A PDF for a client, Markdown for a repository, a web page for a wiki, rich text for Confluence or Google Docs, or a push straight into Hudu with the pictures attached.

Every format is free, with no watermark on the stills. The walkthrough has the details.

Vertical and square clips for social

The same recording exports in 16:9, vertical or square, so one take feeds the landing page, the launch post and a short-form clip.

1. Record the single best moment. Fifteen to thirty seconds is plenty. Narrate it, so the captions carry the story with the sound off.
2. Turn on hero emphasis. With Apple Intelligence, Capta gives the payoff click the strongest zoom and can write the caption for the post.
3. Export vertical. Pick the vertical or square size, keep the captions, and export as MP4 at 60 fps.