Screen recording settings that matter

Most capture settings do not matter. Four do, and getting them right at the start saves the entire class of problems that cannot be fixed afterwards — you can crop, zoom and re-encode a recording, but you cannot add detail to it.

Window size beats resolution

This is the counter-intuitive one. Recording a maximised window on a large monitor gives you a huge frame in which every button is tiny; scaled down to 1080p for export, your interface becomes unreadable and no amount of zooming brings the pixels back. Resize the browser window to something close to the shape you will export — a window roughly 1280 wide is plenty — so the interface occupies the frame properly and text stays legible. As a rule of thumb, keep the source around 1080 on the short edge. Bigger source is not better source here; it is just more empty space around a small UI.

Frame rate: capture high, export sensibly

Capture requests 60 fps where the browser can provide it, because a smooth capture gives the export something good to work from and scrolling looks far better at 60 than at 30. Export is a separate decision: 30 fps is the free tier and is genuinely fine for most demos — clicks, forms and page transitions do not need more. Choose 60 fps for export when the video is mostly continuous motion: scrolling, dragging, animation, anything where the eye tracks a moving object. The encoder allocates about 50% more bitrate at 60 fps, so the file grows accordingly.

Cursor and audio

The cursor is captured as the system draws it and is kept exactly as recorded — nothing here draws a fake cursor, invents a click ripple, or moves the pointer for you, because a viewer who notices an invented cursor stops trusting the whole video. That means what the pointer does in the recording is what it does in the demo, so move it deliberately. Audio, if you enable it, comes from what you are sharing — the tab or screen's own sound — and is carried through to the MP4 as AAC. If the audio cannot be encoded for some reason, the video is still delivered silent rather than failing outright.

What the capture does not limit

There is no cap on how long you record, no file size limit on a clip you drop in, and no codec whitelist beyond what your browser can play — the only thing rejected at load is a clip shorter than one second. The limits live at export: the free tier exports the first 30 seconds at up to 1080p and 30 fps with a small corner watermark, and those numbers are enforced in the browser because the video never reaches a server. That is a known, deliberate trade-off rather than an oversight: keeping the video local means the limit has to be local too.