Release
Shotnix 0.23.0-beta
Added
- A smooth, real macOS cursor. Recordings now capture the pointer as data (on by default — Settings → Recording → Editable cursor), including the actual system cursor artwork at high resolution, so the editor redraws the real arrow, hand, and text beam crisply at any size and zoom. Zero-lag smoothing (Off / Light / Smooth / Silky) that still lands exactly on every click, sizes from 0.6× to 4×, motion blur, hide when idle, click effects (ripple or a springy press), "always show the arrow", and "hide the move to Stop" — the final dash to the Stop button disappears. The pointer is sampled at 60 Hz with button presses and releases.
- Backgrounds: 12 built-in gradient wallpapers, 8 gradients, solid colors plus a custom color picker, your own image, and the desktop pictures on your Mac — with blur, padding, roundness, shadow, and an edge highlight. "Full frame" drops the background in one click, a dice shuffles it, and "Use for new recordings" saves your look for every future recording.
- Aspect ratios: Auto, 16:9, 4:3, 1:1, 4:5, and 9:16. Tall recordings open in their own shape.
- Annotations: text, arrows, highlights, and a real blur that keeps private details hidden even through zooms — all draggable and resizable right on the preview. The tools sit in a dock centered above the preview (Text · Arrow · Highlight · Blur · Zoom): one click adds the effect at the playhead, in view even while zoomed in, ready to drag into place. Double-click text on the preview to type, and ⌘D duplicates. Give arrows, highlights, and text tags any color (swatches or the full color picker) and a thin, regular, or bold line; text can drop its tag for plain lettering with a soft shadow, and light tags switch to dark lettering on their own. New annotations start with the color and weight you used last.
- Export sheet: MP4 (720p, 1080p, 1440p, 4K · 24/30/60 fps · Web/Social/Studio quality · H.264 or HEVC, hardware-encoded) or GIF (small/medium/large, 10–24 fps), exact pixel size and a size estimate before you export, a warning when the output is larger than the recording, live progress with time remaining, cancel, and Copy — export straight to the clipboard to paste into chat or mail. The optional end card now plays after your video on your own background instead of covering its last moments.
- Speed Up Idle fast-forwards stretches where nothing happens (no movement, no clicks, no sound).
- Keyboard-first: Space, J/K/L, frame stepping, S, Z, T/H/A/B, I/O, 1–5 for zoom levels, ⌘D, ⌘C to copy the current frame, ⌘E to export, ⌘K for every command, and ? for the shortcut sheet.
- Open videos in Shotnix — "Open With" in Finder (or dropping a video on the app) opens it in the editor, portrait phone clips included.
- Your camera, as its own layer. Turn on the camera in the recording bar (or Settings → Recording → Camera) and a round live preview floats on screen while you record — it never appears in the screen capture. The camera is saved as a separate track that follows every cut and speed change, so in the editor's Camera tab you can pick a circle, rounded, or wide bubble, resize it, mirror it, drag it anywhere on the preview (it snaps into one of eight spots), let it shrink out of the way during zooms, or hide it.
- Captions from your voice, made on your Mac. The Script tab transcribes the narration on-device — nothing is uploaded — and times every word: short, readable lines that follow your cuts, with words lighting up as they're spoken. Edit any line (timing adapts), drag or trim caption chips on their own timeline lane, add lines by hand, pick size and position, choose the language, and save a subtitles file (.srt) that matches the edited video exactly.
- Keyboard shortcuts on screen. With "Show keyboard shortcuts" on (the ⌘ button in the recording bar), the shortcuts you press appear in the video as keycaps — ⇧ ⌘ 4 — with repeats stacking into "⌘Z ×3". Only ⌘ and ⌃ combinations (and ⌥ with keys that don't type, like arrows), Esc, and function keys are recorded; plain typing never is, including characters typed with ⌥. Hide any single shortcut (a stray ⌘Tab) from its chip on the timeline. Needs Accessibility access, which Shotnix asks for the first time — the button switches on by itself once you allow it.
- Edit the video by editing its words. In the Script tab's "Edit by text", select words in the transcript and press ⌫ to cut them from the video (⌫ again on crossed-out words puts them back); click a word to jump there, ⌘F to find. Remove ums cuts every um and uh in one click (in the transcript's own language), and Shorten pauses trims long silences to a breath — but only where nothing happens on screen, so the time you spend clicking through the demo is never cut. Captions drop the words you cut.
- Better sound. Separate Voice and Computer sound levels when you recorded both (so your narration sits over the app's sound), Enhance voice (removes background noise and hum and evens out your level, processed on this Mac and kept in sync with the picture), and Even out loudness on export (the whole mix lands at −16 LUFS without clipping). Volume and mute changes apply instantly without interrupting the preview.
- More ways to show your camera. Blur or remove what's behind you (your video's own background shows through), a Cutout look with just you over the screen, and camera layouts on their own timeline lane: Full camera for talking points (the bubble grows to fill the frame), Side by side with the screen, and Camera hidden — each eases in and out. One click adds a full-camera intro and outro.
- Vertical videos that follow you. Switch a screen recording to 9:16, 4:5, or 1:1 and it fills the frame instead of shrinking into a letterbox: the view pans with your cursor (calmly, and never losing it), while the camera, captions, and shortcuts stay put in the vertical frame. Turn it off from the aspect menu.
- Crop. Trim browser chrome or a busy desktop out of any recording: drag the crop frame (with a thirds grid, eight handles, and Free/16:9/4:3/1:1/9:16 locks) over the full, uncropped recording. Cursor, clicks, and zooms follow the crop automatically. Esc cancels, Return keeps it.
- Start over anytime. ⌘K → "Start Over from the Original Recording" clears every edit — and ⌘Z brings them all back.
- Long recordings stay fast. A 30-minute take with hundreds of zooms, captions, and shortcuts edits as smoothly as a short one.
Changed
- The video editor, rebuilt from the ground up. A new layout: a big preview, a tabbed inspector (Style · Cursor · Zoom · Camera · Script · Audio) whose panel turns into a dedicated editor when you select something, and a full-width timeline. The toolbar lives in the title bar with crop, aspect ratio, undo/redo, commands, and Export.
- One renderer for preview and export. Every preview frame and every exported frame is drawn by the same Core Image pipeline at the output's own resolution, so what you see is exactly what you get — crisp text (proper downscaling of Retina recordings), squircle corners, soft layered shadows, and camera/cursor motion that runs at the display's refresh rate (and at the export frame rate, even for 30 fps recordings).
- Zooms are blocks, not keyframes. Each zoom is one block on the Zoom track: hover the track and click to add one (or press Z), drag to move, drag an edge to change how long it lasts, click to edit. The camera eases in at the block's start and is fully back out by its end; blocks close together chain into a smooth pan instead of zooming out and back in. Transitions are paced by depth, zoom in log space, and motion-blur like a real camera. Edges snap to the playhead, clip boundaries, clicks, and other zooms when you let go.
- The camera can follow your cursor. A zoom set to "Follow cursor" keeps the pointer in view and glides after it with a calm dead zone; "Aim by hand" shows the whole frame with a draggable target rectangle — drag it to aim, drag a corner to zoom in or out.
- Auto Zoom lands before the click. Fresh recordings open already produced: each burst of clicks gets its own zoom, timed so the camera has arrived before you click, following the cursor in between. Re-running Auto Zoom keeps zooms you placed by hand, and "Remove all zooms" clears them in one step.
- Timeline editing, done right. Split (S), drag clip edges to trim (the preview shows the exact edge frame while you drag), ⇧-drag to select a range and cut it, speed from 0.5× to 16×, per-clip mute and fades, and yellow markers where material was removed — click one to put it back. Real thumbnails and an audio waveform on every clip, a ghost playhead that follows the mouse, and pinch or ⌘-scroll to zoom the timeline. Drags follow the pointer exactly and snap when you let go.
- Annotations stack like layers. The timeline stacks the way the picture does: captions and keyboard shortcuts on top (they always draw in front), then annotation lanes (the highest lane draws in front), the camera moves, and the recording at the base. A new annotation that overlaps others goes on top, and dragging a bar up brings it forward.
- Undo covers everything — every edit, and each drag or slider scrub is exactly one step.
- Timed-capture countdown redesigned — the number sits optically centered in the circle, an accent ring depletes smoothly across the wait, each tick lands with a soft pop, and the cancel hint moved into a readable capsule below the circle.
Fixed
- Recordings keep their data when you rename or move them. Renaming or moving a recording in Finder lost its editable cursor, clicks, shortcuts, camera, and every edit. They now travel with the file. Recordings saved in deep folders (long or non-English paths) no longer lose them either.
- The editor stays in front after a recording. It could open, then slip behind the app you'd been recording and need reopening from the menu bar. Opening the Shotnix menu, taking a screenshot, or opening Settings while an editor is open also no longer removes the editor's Dock icon and ⌘-Tab entry.
- Recordings keep their exact colors. Reds, greens, and brand colors were slightly shifted when encoded; they now match the screen. Area recordings capture whole pixels at exactly the recorded size (no soft or empty edge on odd-sized selections).
- Exports look like the preview. Mid-tones came out lighter than in the editor; exported videos now match it.
- GIF export works at any length. It failed with "Could not write the GIF" unless the video's length happened to be a whole number of frames.
- Updates install again on macOS 26. After downloading an update, installing could fail with "An error occurred while running the updater": Shotnix's identifier ends in ".app", so macOS mistook the updater's working folder for an app and blocked the installer from writing to it. The built-in updater (now Sparkle 2.10) uses a folder macOS doesn't confuse with an app. If an older version still fails to update, download the latest version from shotnix.com and replace the app.
Get the current build.
Newer releases include everything on this page. Existing installs update in place through the built-in Sparkle updater.
11.7 MB · Apple silicon (M1 or later) · macOS 13+ · notarized by Apple · MIT license