Recordly

Open-source screen recorder and editor for polished product demos, walkthroughs, tutorials, and social clips. Records screen or window, then provides a timeline editor with auto-zoom, cursor effects, webcam overlays, styled backgrounds, and MP4/GIF export. All effects are 2D pan-and-zoom with motion blur — not 3D perspective transforms.

Fork of OpenScreen (siddharthvaddem/openscreen, 10.6K stars, MIT). Recordly adds: webcam zoom-reactive scaling, .recordly project persistence, auto-captions (Whisper), enhanced cursor effects (sway, click bounce, loop mode), native capture backends. AGPL 3.0.

When to Use

• Recording polished screen demos for PRs, docs, or social media
• Post-processing raw screen recordings with auto-zoom, cursor smoothing, and styled frames
• Creating product walkthrough videos with webcam overlay
• Polishing recordings captured via compound-engineering:feature-video

When not to use: For raw screen capture without polish (use macOS screenshot, OBS, or QuickTime). For headless/batch video processing (use ffmpeg). For device frame mockups with phone/laptop bezels (use Rotato or Shots.so). For audio mixing or voiceover (use a dedicated audio editor).

Quick Start

# Install Recordly (clone, build, handle macOS quarantine)
bash scripts/install_recordly.sh

# Launch Recordly (or open a file directly)
bash scripts/launch_recordly.sh
bash scripts/launch_recordly.sh path/to/recording.mp4
bash scripts/launch_recordly.sh path/to/project.recordly

Installation

Run the install script to clone, install dependencies, and build:

bash scripts/install_recordly.sh

The script clones webadderall/Recordly to ~/tools/recordly/, runs npm install, builds the platform-appropriate app, and handles macOS quarantine.

Alternatively, download prebuilt releases from https://github.com/webadderall/Recordly/releases. On Arch Linux: yay -S recordly-bin.

Integration with feature-video

Raw screen captures from compound-engineering:feature-video look unprofessional without post-processing — jarring mouse movements, no zoom on key interactions, plain backgrounds. Recordly fixes this:

1. Launch Recordly: bash scripts/launch_recordly.sh
2. Open the raw recording file in Recordly
3. Apply auto-zoom, cursor effects, and background styling
4. Export as MP4 and use the polished video in the PR description

3D Perspective Mode (Slant)

Flat screen recordings look generic on social media. Rendering them on a 3D plane with camera animation, HDRI reflections, and depth of field makes them look like Slant it ($69) or Screen Studio output — for free.

# Open the 3D perspective renderer in any modern browser
open scripts/slant.html

1. Drop a screen recording onto the viewport (or use the file picker)
2. Pick an animation preset (12 built-in: Hero Float, Dramatic Tilt, Orbit, Slide In, Push/Pull, Isometric, Carousel, Cinematic Pan, etc.)
3. Adjust background (gradient, solid color, or HDRI environment), depth of field, screen reflections
4. Export as MP4 (Twitter-ready, H.264), WebM, or GIF (GitHub PRs where GIFs render inline)

Self-contained HTML file — Three.js r183 from CDN, no build step, no server, no local dependencies. See README.md for the full preset gallery, export format details, and browser support matrix.

Links

• Repo: github.com/webadderall/Recordly
• Releases: github.com/webadderall/Recordly/releases
• Upstream (OpenScreen): github.com/siddharthvaddem/openscreen
• License: AGPL 3.0