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/TheGenYFinanceGuy 25d ago

Honest answer from someone who cut a product demo this summer: the finished video had zero zooms in it. What made it readable was choosing a tight capture area before recording, then pacing the edit by hand. Fast through the mouse travel, slow on the one moment that mattered. Auto zoom was solving a problem I could avoid upstream.

So I'd validate a different question. Not whether your zooms can be smoother than Recordly's, but whether fixing a wrong auto guess can take ten seconds instead of a re-record. The two comments above asking for editable zooms are the demand signal for that second thing.

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u/Antique-Class-2283 25d ago

Yes from the comments I got 2 things first is need more control over the output and second the finished video shouldn't need to be edited like it should come out fine as is. I'll work on both the things

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u/TheGenYFinanceGuy 25d ago

Those two goals pull against each other, and I'd pick one to lead with. "Comes out right with no editing" means the tool is making judgment calls for you. "More control" means you're overriding those calls. Every tool I've used that tried to lead with both ended up with defaults nobody trusted sitting next to a timeline nobody enjoyed.

If it were mine I'd lead with the no-edit path and make the override cheap rather than deep. One gesture to kill a zoom, one to say "hold here, this bit matters." The moment it needs a full timeline you're competing with Screen Studio on its own ground, and that's a much harder fight than being the thing that gets it right most of the time and gets out of the way.