Capture
Record a display, a window, or an area.
Capture is where the quality of everything downstream is decided: the colour, the window's corner radius, the cursor data that zooms are built from. Lumae records through ScreenCaptureKit straight to disk and keeps the metadata the editor will need.
- Requires
- macOS 26.0 or later
- Modes
- display, window, area
- Capture
- ScreenCaptureKit, H.264 to disk
- Colour
- sRGB, end to end
- Countdown
- 3 s, cancellable
- Interaction data
- cursor at 60 Hz, clicks, scroll
Lumae's own selector
A borderless window covers every display, with Display, Window and Area in a toolbar at the bottom, the way ⇧⌘5 works, and Space toggling between area and window the way ⇧⌘4 does. Windows come with their titles and are ordered front to back by the window server, so clicking takes the frontmost one under the pointer. An area is a drag under a crosshair that reports the pointer's coordinates, then the selection's size, and stays up with eight handles until you press Record.
Lumae never becomes the active app while the selector is up, so nothing of Lumae's comes forward over what you are about to capture and the app that was in front stays in front, active title bar included. Lumae's own windows are excluded from the capture besides.
Colour that survives the trip
Screen content is sRGB, and SDR screen video is stored as sRGB numbers under a BT.709 tag. Left at its default, the capture stream delivers the display's own colour space, Display P3 on current Macs, and tags the file 709 without converting: pure red comes back as 233, 51, 36 and every recording looks slightly washed out.
Lumae asks the stream for sRGB, tags the composition explicitly, and reads and writes sRGB numbers throughout, so an exported pixel carries the same numbers as the recorded one. It was measured with a window of known patches captured, composed and exported.
Retake and stitch
A clip you are unhappy with can be re-recorded in place. The retake opens in the same mode as the clip it replaces, and the swap is one undo step. Everything around it, the zooms on other clips, the narration, the captions, is untouched.
Imported files sit on the timeline beside recordings, so a demo can stitch a screen capture, a camera clip and an exported animation end to end. Trim, split and reorder all work the same way on any of them.
Audio, and what gets recorded alongside
System audio and the microphone are separate toggles, and the chosen microphone is remembered by its name, so unplugging it falls back to the system default instead of quietly becoming a different device. Recordings with separate system and microphone tracks keep both.
Alongside the video, Lumae records the cursor's position at 60 Hz, its changing image, clicks, scrolls and the captured window's bounds. That is what Automatic Zoom reads, what the drawn cursor is built from, and what makes a recording re-editable months later.
Questions
Do I have to grant Screen Recording permission?
Yes, once. macOS only lets an app read the screen with that permission, so Lumae asks the first time you open it and Settings › Permissions shows where it stands. The microphone is separate and is only asked for when you record with it on.
Is there a time limit or a watermark?
Neither. Lumae is free with no account, no watermark and no export limits.
Where do recordings go?
Into ~/Movies/Lumae as .lumae packages: the original media plus a small description of the edits. Editing never rewrites the media, and older projects migrate forward automatically.
Next
All features
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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