What Is Screen Recording?

Screen recording captures every pixel on your display — or a portion of it — and encodes those frames into a video file as they occur in real time. The result is a faithful replay of whatever happened on screen: cursor movement, clicks, typing, animations, and UI transitions. Most modern operating systems ship with basic screen recording built in. macOS includes a Screenshot toolbar (accessible with ⇧⌘5) and QuickTime Player, both of which can save raw screen footage to disk without installing anything extra.

Screen recording is a broader concept than screencasting. A screencast typically implies narration or educational intent, while screen recording simply means capturing the display output — narration is optional. Screen capture is an even broader term that covers both still screenshots and video recordings. Video capture, by contrast, can refer to ingesting video from external hardware sources such as cameras or capture cards, not just the display. Understanding where screen recording sits in this taxonomy helps you pick the right tool for the job.

For most practical workflows — software demos, bug reports, tutorial videos, social content, async team updates — screen recording is the starting point. Raw recordings, however, often need post-processing: trimming dead air, speeding through slow sections, highlighting clicks, or adding context with annotations. Limelight is a native macOS screen recorder that handles these steps in one place: it records the display offline with no upload, auto-zooms into every click, bakes keystrokes and a cursor spotlight into the video, and lets you trim and export without leaving the app.