Vuoom

Screen recordings that zoom where it matters.

A free, open-source screen recorder for Windows with cinematic auto-zoom. Record your screen, the camera glides into the action, and you export a small, crisp demo GIF or MP4 ready for your GitHub README, changelog, Slack, or product post. No account, no watermark, no subscription.

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Why Vuoom?

A flat recording of your whole screen makes UI text tiny and the "wow" moment invisible. The tools that fix this, the ones that smoothly zoom into each click like a little camera operator (Screen Studio and friends), are Mac-only, paid, or both. Vuoom is that experience as a free Screen Studio alternative for Windows, in a small native app:

Record, zoom happens where you point, cut the dead air, export a GIF or MP4 you can paste anywhere.

A studio, not a toolbar

The interface is a quiet workspace built from floating panels you control:

• Every panel is yours to arrange. Show or hide the tool rail, inspector and timeline (Ctrl+1/2/3), drag the inspector and timeline to any size, collapse the timeline to its transport bar, slim the tool rail to icons. Double click a divider to reset it, Ctrl+0 resets everything. Layout is remembered.
• An inspector that follows you. Select something and its every property is there in collapsible sections; select nothing and the Clip tab holds the whole-recording settings: frame and backdrop, crop, auto zooms, pacing, click ripples and keystrokes.
• Search every action with Ctrl+K, right-click anything for its menu, and hover any control to see its shortcut.
• Home that starts the right take: Region, Full screen or Window, with frame rate, zoom strength, audio and countdown set right there.

Home that starts the right take. Region, full screen or window, with frame rate, zoom and countdown on the page; recovery and recents below.	Framing first. One glass HUD over the frozen desktop: aspect presets, zoom, fps and countdown next to a single Record button.
Export without a wizard. Format cards, presets, sliders, an honest size estimate and a fit-under-N-MB helper, then copy or reveal.	Five themes, re-tuned. Black and white first, plus Graphite, Paper and Midnight. No purple anywhere.

Features

• 🎥 Native capture: Windows Graphics Capture at full resolution: a region (free or 16:9 / 9:16 / 1:1 / 4:5), a whole display, or a single app window, on any monitor, with pause/resume. Capture is paced at the compositor to the frame rate you pick (24 / 30 / 60 fps), so a 144 Hz screen doesn't burn CPU on frames nobody needs.
• 🖱️ A smooth pointer: record without the real cursor and Vuoom draws a clean one from your movements, gliding (jitter smoothed out with no lag), pressing on every click, sized so it stays legible in a small GIF, scaling with the zoom like the real thing, and (if you like) fading away while it rests, back just before it moves.
• 🎙️ Narration and system sound: record your microphone, everything the computer plays, or both, each as its own track with a live level meter while you frame the shot. Audio is timed by the same clock as the frames, so it stays in sync through every cut and speed-up; sped-up stretches play silent. Waveforms sit on the timeline, with volume and mute per track, and MP4 exports carry an AAC soundtrack.
• 🎥 You, in the corner: record your webcam alongside the screen and it appears as a bubble you can move to any corner, resize, reshape (circle, rounded square, 16:9) and mirror after the fact. The record HUD previews it live, right where it will sit.
• 🧹 Studio-clean narration: one switch removes fan noise, hum and hiss (RNNoise), another evens out a voice that drifts toward and away from the mic, with peaks held safely under clipping. Both work on a copy, so the original recording is always one click away.
• 💬 Captions, made offline: one click turns your narration into captions, on your own computer (whisper.cpp; the speech model downloads once, nothing is uploaded). They show in the preview and in every GIF and MP4, bottom or top, at the size you pick; fix any word in the inspector, drag a caption's bar to retime it, and save an .srt file timed to your export for YouTube and other players.
• 🗜️ Recordings that stay small: frames are stored losslessly as LZ4 compressed XOR deltas with periodic keyframes, typically 20x+ smaller than raw pixels, streamed to disk as you record so length is bounded by your drive and a crash never loses the take.
• 🔍 Cinematic zoom: press Ctrl+Shift+Z while recording to glide the camera into your cursor (and again to pull back out). Critically damped spring motion, never a hard cut. In the editor every zoom is aimable (follow the cursor or lock a crosshair), has a feel (Smooth / Snappy / Slow), and Auto zooms can re-plan them from your clicks at any strength. Every zoom and pan carries a touch of motion blur, like a camera shutter, so even a 30 fps GIF glides.
• 🎞️ A real editor, not a video NLE: timeline with named, colour-coded tracks, magnetic snapping, trim handles (or I / O), cuts, speed-ups, Skim idle (2 to 8x on dead stretches), timeline zoom, undo/redo across everything.
• ✂️ Visual crop: drag a crop rectangle right on the video with aspect locks and rule-of-thirds guides, or pick a centered preset.
• ✏️ Annotations: text you type right on the video (six display fonts, bold/italic, several lines, legible plate), a freehand pen and marker, arrows, lines, boxes, ellipses, highlights, a spotlight that dims everything else, and redaction masks, each with its own timeline bar, colour, opacity, fade in / fade out and stacking order.
• 👆 Demo polish: click ripples, a keystroke overlay that shows shortcuts (never plain typing), and Subtle / Studio frame presets on seven backdrops.
• 📦 Export GIF or MP4: optimized GIF with a live size estimate and a fit-under-N-MB helper, or H.264 MP4 up to 60 fps encoded by Windows on your GPU (NVENC / Quick Sync / AMF) when available. One-click Copy pastes the file anywhere.
• 💾 Projects and crash recovery: save a .vuoom project in seconds (the compressed frames are copied, not re-encoded), reopen it from the recents grid, and recover the last unsaved take after a crash.
• 🎨 Five themes, reduced-motion mode, and zero purple.
• 🪶 Lightweight: Tauri + Rust, not Electron. The webview is just the cockpit; capture, compositing (wgpu) and encoding run natively.

Quick start

1. Download the .msi (recommended) or .exe installer.

   Builds are not yet code-signed: SmartScreen will warn. Click More info, then Run anyway.

2. Press Record, frame your shot, turn on the microphone if you want to narrate, hit Start.
3. While recording: Ctrl+Shift+Z to zoom in/out, Pause if you need a beat, Ctrl+Shift+X to stop.
4. Trim the ends, cut the fumbles, skim the idle parts, drop a text label or arrow, toggle click ripples.
5. Export, choose GIF or MP4, Copy, paste it wherever the demo goes.

Keyboard shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
Ctrl+Shift+R	Start the record flow
Ctrl+Shift+Z	Zoom in / out at the cursor (while recording)
Ctrl+Shift+X	Stop recording (global)
Ctrl+K	Search every action
Space	Play / pause
← / →	Scrub the playhead (Shift = 1s jumps, Home/End = trim bounds)
I / O	Trim start / end at the playhead (Shift clears)
Z / X / C	Insert a zoom / speed-up / cut at the playhead
V T A P S H L M	Select, Text, Arrow, Pen, Shape, Highlight, Spotlight, Hide
Arrow keys	Nudge the selected annotation (Shift = bigger steps)
Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y	Undo / redo any edit
Ctrl+D / Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V	Duplicate / copy / paste annotations
Ctrl+] / Ctrl+[	Bring forward / send backward (Shift = front / back)
Delete	Remove the selected annotation, zoom, speed-up, or cut
Ctrl+1 / Ctrl+2 / Ctrl+3	Show or hide tools / inspector / timeline
Ctrl+0	Reset the layout
Ctrl+S / Ctrl+O	Save / open a project
Ctrl+Shift+S	Save the project under a new name
Ctrl+E	Export GIF / MP4
Ctrl+,	Settings
?	Keyboard cheat sheet

How it's built

SolidJS + Vite (editor UI)  <-WebSocket preview-  Rust engine
                                                  |- vuoom-capture   Windows Graphics Capture (any monitor)
                                                  |- vuoom-audio     mic + system sound (WASAPI), edit-aware mixer
                                                  |- vuoom-input     global input log (QPC-stamped)
                                                  |- vuoom-zoom      auto-zoom planner + spring camera
                                                  |- vuoom-render    wgpu compositor (zoom, text, shapes, overlays)
                                                  |- vuoom-encode    GIF encoding + size estimation
                                                  |- vuoom-project   .vuoom project model (undo-able edits)
                                                  `- app shell       MP4 (Media Foundation), disk-backed
                                                                     frame store + crash recovery

The same render(t) path drives scrubbing and export, so what you preview is exactly what ships. While recording, frames stream straight to disk as compressed deltas: clip length is bounded by your drive, not your RAM. The UI is a SolidJS app whose state lives in one editor store (src/editor/) that the components in src/components/ render. Design docs live in docs/, including the redesign blueprint.

Building from source

pnpm install
pnpm tauri dev      # run locally
pnpm tauri build    # produce installers

Working on the UI without building Rust

The frontend ships with a browser mock of the engine, so you can run the whole interface in a plain browser (handy on low-end machines):

pnpm dev            # then open the printed localhost URL with ?mock=1

Useful mock URL flags: ?mock=1 (force the mock), &demo=1 (load a sample take), &export=1 (open export), &record=1 (jump to the region selector), &theme=graphite (force a theme). The mock is dev-only; the packaged app never uses it.

Releases are built and published by GitHub Actions on every push to main; CI runs typecheck, Biome, clippy (deny warnings), and the full Rust test suite.

License

Apache-2.0. Free for everyone, forever. That's the point.