Camera
Put yourself in the picture.
A demo is easier to follow when there is somebody in it. Lumae films your camera onto a lane of its own, in lip sync with the screen because one session wrote both, and draws it over the finished picture as a bubble whose shape, size and corner you can still change a week later.
- Shapes
- circle, squircle, square, widescreen
- Size
- 8 % to 50 % of canvas height
- Default bubble
- 22 %, bottom right, 56 px in
- Ring
- 0 to 24 px, drawn outside
- Mirrored
- on by default
- Shortest take
- 0.1 s
Filmed with the screen, or against the cut
Turn the camera on in the capture bar and the screen recording films it too. One capture session writes the camera and the microphone into one file, which is the whole point: a face and the words it is saying have to stay in sync, and two sessions started a frame apart would not.
Or film a take afterwards. Press record in Inspector › Camera and the timeline plays from the playhead while you talk to it, the way narration is recorded. Either way the file lands as two items, a camera take on the camera lane and a narration segment on the narration lane, both pointing at the same recording and free to be trimmed apart.
A bubble, not a rectangle in the corner
Four shapes: a circle, a squircle on Apple's continuous curve, a hard-cornered square, and widescreen, which keeps the camera's own aspect. The first three crop the camera to a square about its centre, which is where a face sits and what makes a circle a circle rather than an ellipse.
Size is a share of the canvas height rather than a pixel count, from 8 % to 50 %, so the bubble keeps its proportion whatever the canvas is and whatever an export downscales to. The ring around it is drawn outside the bubble rather than over it, so turning the stroke up never eats into the face, and it stays a true squircle instead of an offset curve.
Anchored to a corner, dragged anywhere
The bubble is stored as a corner and a distance in from it, not as a point. That is what lets the sliders read 56 px from the edge and still describe a bubble dragged anywhere on the preview: a drag re-anchors to whichever corner it lands nearest, so the drag and the sliders are one setting seen two ways. It also keeps the bubble in its corner when the canvas size changes.
Nearest is measured from the bubble's centre against the canvas's, so a bubble dragged across the middle keeps the corner it came from until it crosses the halfway line rather than flickering between anchors on the way.
It holds still while the camera moves
The bubble is drawn after the zoom and under the caption. After the zoom because it is anchored to the canvas the way a caption is: a camera move must not drag your face off the picture or change its size. Under the caption because text at the foot of the frame has to stay readable over a bubble in that corner. It needs no motion blur either, since it does not move with the camera and its own picture was already blurred by the lens that filmed it.
Every take starts out following the video's bubble and may depart from it in one property while inheriting the rest, with the same badges and the same way back that per-clip looks use. Where a take plays is part of the composition; the bubble's look is not, so moving or reshaping it swaps in place while a slider is still under your finger.
Questions
Does the camera need its own permission?
Yes. macOS asks for Camera the first time you turn it on, separately from Screen Recording and from the microphone, and Settings › Permissions shows where all three stand.
Can I move or resize the bubble after recording?
Yes, at any time. What was filmed is the camera's own file; the bubble is drawn at render time from the project, so shape, size, corner, ring, shadow and mirroring are all still yours afterwards. The mirror panel on screen while you film is only a mirror and is excluded from the capture, so it can never be baked in.
Does my voice come in with the camera?
If the microphone is on, yes, into the same file, which is what keeps it in lip sync. It is placed on the narration lane as an ordinary take, so it can be levelled, faded and ducked under like any other narration, and the camera take carries no sound of its own.
Next
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Record your next demo. Annotate your next screenshot.
Lumae is free. Download the disk image, drag it into Applications, and press record or take a screenshot.
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