How to Record a Webinar on Your Mac

When you are hosting, use your webinar platform's own recorder if it has one, since it captures the presenter, slides, and audio cleanly and stores the file for you. As an attendee, you usually cannot record inside the platform, so reach for Apple's built-in Shift-Command-5 toolbar. Press it, click Options to choose your microphone and a save location, pick Record Entire Screen, and click Record; the webinar plays as usual while macOS captures it. Stop with Control-Command-Escape and you get a .mov on your Desktop. QuickTime's New Screen Recording works the same way if you prefer its interface.

The catch with any local capture is audio. Shift-Command-5 records your own microphone but not the sound coming from the webinar itself, because macOS does not expose internal audio by default. To capture the presenter's voice, install a free loopback driver like BlackHole, build a Multi-Output Device in Audio MIDI Setup so you still hear the talk, and select BlackHole as the recorder's input. Commercial tools such as Loopback do this with a nicer interface. With that in place, your recording carries both the on-screen slides and the presenter's audio for later review.

Webinars you run yourself often include a live product demo, and that is where Limelight earns its place. It is a native macOS screen recorder that records locally and fully offline, uploading nothing, so unreleased features stay private. It auto-zooms into every click, smooths the cursor into clean motion, and renders a clean padded background, then bakes on-screen keystrokes, a cursor spotlight, and freehand annotations into the video. That keystroke display, which most recorders including Screen Studio lack, makes it easy for attendees to follow shortcuts and typed steps during a technical walkthrough without you narrating every keypress.

For repurposing, record your demo segment in Limelight rather than relying on the platform's flat recording, then use the built-in editor to trim, ripple-delete filler, speed up slow parts, and fine-tune the zoom before exporting. Choose mp4 for on-demand replays or a vertical 9:16 clip for promo snippets. Limelight is free to start with the cursor spotlight; Pro is $2.99/month or a $34 one-time lifetime license. Because Limelight does not record audio yet, capture your narration with Shift-Command-5 or QuickTime and layer it onto the polished visuals in any editor.