Screen recording

Screen recording captures what is happening on a display as video, normally with the recorder's voice over it. It is the oldest and most useful function in this vocabulary, because a great deal of work happens on screens and describing an interface in words is slow and unreliable.

There are three common capture scopes. A full screen records everything, which is simplest and risks showing notifications you would rather not share. A single window or tab records one application, which is tidier and is what most work recordings should use. A selected region records part of the screen, which suits a narrow demonstration.

Browser-based recorders ask the operating system for permission through the browser's own picker, which is why the choice of what to share appears in a system dialogue rather than inside the tool. Desktop applications ask once and remember, which is more convenient and requires an installation.

Audio is the part people get wrong. Microphone audio and system audio are separate streams: the first captures your voice, the second captures what the computer is playing. A recording of a video that has no sound in it is almost always a system-audio setting rather than a broken recorder. Recording somewhere quiet does more for the result than any camera or encoder setting.

Length discipline matters more here than in any other format, because a screen recording is the easiest video in the world to make and therefore the easiest to make badly. Recording your whole afternoon is trivial; watching it is not. The recordings people actually finish are the ones where somebody decided in advance what the single point was, and stopped once they had made it.