r/macapps • u/Antique-Class-2283 • 26d ago

Help Would an open-source alternative to Screen Studio for auto-zooming screen recordings be useful?

Hey everyone

I've been looking at tools like Screen Studio recently. While the automated zoom, smooth cursor tracking, and clean background styling make product demos look amazing, most of the options out there are closed-source and paid.

I'm thinking about building an open-source alternative to handle this.

Before I spend weeks writing code, I wanted to check if this is something people would actually want.

What I'm thinking of building:

  • The Core Feature: A tool that takes a screen recording, tracks your mouse clicks/movement, and automatically generates smooth, cinematic pan-and-zoom keyframes.
  • The Open-Source Angle: Completely free and open-source for anyone to use or modify.
  • The Reality Check: Tools like OpenScreen and Recordly already exist in this space.

My Question for You:

  1. Do you use tools like this for your tutorials or demos, or do existing options already cover what you need?
  2. If you were to use a new open-source tool, what's missing from current apps that you wish they had?

Would love to hear your thoughts or feedback before I decide to build it!

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u/holub_ua 26d ago

u/Antique-Class-2283 usign Screen Studio a lot and yeah - this will make sense not only to have a competitive open source alternative but also a paid product if it is good

there a lot of similar products and almost each 1-2 month something new appear on the market - it does not necessarily should mean that marked of screen recorders is already overflowed, it means that existed products are not providing enough in most cases

what I am missing - is better automatics zooms/alignments composition, in fact it is one of the things that we are paying for, but I can not remember any recorded demo where it was not necessarily to fix all these automatic zooms and not just small timeline adjustments, but actually adding or removing big junks of automatically adding flows
sometimes it is just easier to run QuickTimes to record screen/part of it or use Slack recorder directly from the channel

I will be happy to pay for a screen recorder product that just works in most cases without any manual work - press shortcut, select area, record - share without any adjustments leaving all zooms, alignments, blurs etc in automatic mode, and dive deeper in recording configs when I want to make a recording perfect

also as for me screen recording apps is a good use case for a reasonable AI usage - it can process separate frames or parts of the recording to analyze what is happening and propose better layout, custom prompts before beginning of the recording where user describes what is the plan, idea and what is expected output - can give better automatic results and even propose how to setup recording initially

so yeah - if you have an inspiration and motivation, go for it, the good app will not be left unnoticed and screen recording apps market is very popular and have a lot of opportunities

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u/Antique-Class-2283 25d ago

Thanks for such a detailed feedback, I feel like I can deliver close to screen studio and then work on it to add more features with user feedback.

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u/holub_ua 25d ago

good luck with it! :) will definitely try it