How to Record/Capture Your Screen on a Mac OS X for Free

Many people assume that you need a robust and expensive piece of software in order to record your Mac screen and to create a professional screencast. Although there are many expensive, robust and dynamic screen recording software’s available such as Camtasia, Movavi and Screenflick; there is also one very popular yet hidden software you can utilize to record your screen for tutorials, game casting and how-to videos. You may be surprised when I tell you that QuickTime Player has a built in Screen Recording mode.

QuickTime Player is more popular for being software to watch videos, listen to audio and opening up other audio/visual files that many other software’s cannot. It also has three separate recording options that a user can utilize. All of these options are on the standard QuickTime Player that anyone can download for free. The three options are Movie Recording, Audio Recording and Screen Recording.

When you chose to open QuickTime Player, it may be a little confusing at first because there will no screen or window that opens up upon opening the software. All that changes on your screen it the toolbar on your Mac OS X; which will say QuickTime Player. To begin recording your screen you simply click the “File” option and then select “New Screen Recording”.

After you choose this option you will be prompt to begin recording your screen with a small pop-up window that has a red recording button. From here there are several options that you can choose from. You can either drag the mouse across the screen to only choose a part of the screen or just double click to begin recording the whole screen. The screen recording with QuickTime Player is flawless and is in full HD so there is no need to worry about the quality of recording.

After completing your recording, you simply just click the recording icon on your toolbar. It will automatically begin a playback of what you previously recorded and let you choose what type of file to save it as. In order to edit the video there are several different options to choose from.

One of the most popular ways to edit a video is just by uploading it to YouTube. From there they have quite a dynamic and free video editor that you can utilize that allows you to add text, crop the video size and change the quality if you want to lower quality so it buffers quickly on YouTube. Now if you do not want to actually publish it to YouTube all you must do I set the video to private and then download it as an .mp4 file under the video manager options.