Screen Studio

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Build me a screen recorder that replaces Screen Studio — and know exactly why this is ALMOST.

The recording is easy. The reason people pay is **automatic zoom that looks hand-edited**: the camera pushes in on where the cursor is working, holds, and pulls back, with easing that feels deliberate. That is a small amount of code and a great deal of taste, and getting it slightly wrong produces something worse than no zoom at all.

STACK
- A native application: Swift and AVFoundation on macOS, or an equivalent elsewhere. Browser capture cannot get the cursor precision or the system audio this needs
- ffmpeg for the final render
- SQLite on device for projects
- No server required; add one only for sharing

WHAT IS RECORDED, WHICH IS THE KEY DECISION
- The screen at full resolution, and — separately — a **track of cursor positions, clicks and keystrokes with timestamps**
- That separate track is what makes everything else possible. Zoom, cursor smoothing, click effects and keystroke display are all computed at render time from it, so they can be adjusted after the recording rather than baked in
- Record at the display's native resolution and keep the scale factor, so a high-density capture is not resampled into mush
- The camera as its own track, and the microphone and system audio as their own tracks

THE ZOOM, WHICH IS THE PRODUCT
- Detect regions of activity from the cursor track: a cluster of movement and clicks in a small area is a place worth looking at
- Push in over roughly half a second, hold while the activity continues, pull back over a similar time when it moves away or stops
- Ease in and out. A linear zoom reads as a machine; an ease-in-out reads as a person
- Never zoom more than a modest factor, or the recording becomes seasick. Never zoom twice within a couple of seconds
- Follow the cursor within a zoom with a damped spring rather than tracking it exactly, so small movements do not shake the frame
- Every zoom is an editable keyframe afterwards: move it, resize it, delete it. Automatic placement is a first draft, and the ability to fix one is what makes the automation acceptable
- Get this wrong and the video is unwatchable. Record a real five-minute demo, watch it end to end, and adjust the thresholds until nothing makes you flinch

THE OTHER EFFECTS
- Cursor smoothing: interpolate the path so a jittery hand looks steady, and scale the cursor up so it is visible at video size
- A click effect — a ripple or a highlight — drawn at the click's timestamp
- Keystrokes displayed for the shortcuts that matter, with a rule that anything typed into a password field is never shown. That rule is not optional
- A background with padding, rounded corners and a shadow, which is what makes a screen recording look like a product shot rather than a screenshot

EDITING
- Trim the ends, cut a section from the middle, and adjust speed on a range — speeding up a slow part is the most-used edit in a demo
- Automatic silence removal offered rather than applied
- The camera as a circle or rectangle, movable, with its own timeline so it can appear only when you are talking
- Everything non-destructive: the source tracks are untouched and the edit is a list of operations

RENDERING
- Composite with ffmpeg from the source tracks and the effect list
- MP4 with a widely playable codec, plus GIF for a short loop with a proper palette rather than the default one
- A hard duration cap and a visible size estimate
- Re-render with different settings without re-recording, because the sources are kept

OPERATIONS
- Projects on disk in a documented format, so nothing is trapped
- If you add sharing: a small server with token links, expiry and view counts, and the same retention discipline as any video service
- No analytics in the application

WHAT MATTERS MOST
The cursor track and the zoom easing. Record the track separately so every effect stays editable, then spend the time on the easing curves — that taste is the entire difference between this and a screen recording.