Vuoom

Screen recordings that zoom where it matters.

A free, open-source screen recorder for Windows with cinematic auto-zoom — record your screen, the camera glides into the action, and you export a small, crisp demo GIF or MP4 ready for your GitHub README, changelog, Slack, or product post. No account, no watermark, no subscription.

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Why Vuoom?

A flat recording of your whole screen makes UI text tiny and the "wow" moment invisible. The tools that fix this — the ones that smoothly zoom into each click like a little camera operator (Screen Studio, and friends) — are Mac-only, paid, or both. Vuoom is that experience as a free Screen Studio alternative for Windows, in a small native app:

Record → zoom happens where you point → cut the dead air → export a GIF or MP4 you can paste anywhere.

Features

• 🎥 Native capture — Windows Graphics Capture at full resolution, full screen or a region (16:9 / 9:16 / 1:1 / 4:5 presets for social-ready framing). A red frame shows exactly what's being recorded (and never appears in it). Works on any monitor — Vuoom records the display it's sitting on — and you can pause/resume mid-take.
• 🔍 Cinematic zoom — press Ctrl+Shift+Z while recording to glide the camera into your cursor (and again to pull back out). Critically-damped spring motion, never a hard cut, never shows off-screen area. In the editor, every zoom is aimable: follow the cursor, or drag a crosshair to lock onto one spot.
• 🎞️ A real editor, not a video NLE — timeline with a ruler, playhead and drag-to-scrub; trim handles; cut out the middle bits you don't want; zoom blocks you can move, resize, re-level, add, or delete; "Skim idle" that plays dead stretches at 2–8×, plus manual speed regions; undo/redo across everything (Ctrl+Z).
• ✏️ Annotations — text labels (bold/italic, color presets), arrows, boxes and ellipses with fill/thickness controls. Each one gets its own timeline lane — drag to control when (and how long) it shows, Ctrl+D to duplicate.
• 👆 Demo polish, baked in — click ripples at every recorded mouse click, a keystroke overlay that shows shortcuts like Ctrl+C as chips (plain typing is never shown — passwords can't leak), and Subtle / Studio frame presets (padded backdrop, rounded corners, shadow).
• 📦 Export GIF or MP4 — optimized GIF for READMEs (with a live size estimate), or H.264 MP4 up to 60 fps for Slack / X / YouTube — encoded by Windows itself, no ffmpeg. One-click Copy pastes the file anywhere.
• 💾 Projects & crash recovery — save everything as a .vuoom bundle; frames stream to disk while recording, so length isn't capped by RAM and a crash or accidental close offers "Recover last session" on the next launch.
• 🎨 Five clean themes — black & white first; zero purple.
• 🪶 Lightweight — Tauri + Rust, not Electron. The webview is just the cockpit; capture, compositing (wgpu), and encoding all run natively.

Quick start

1. Download the .msi (recommended) or .exe installer.

   Builds are not yet code-signed — SmartScreen will warn. Click More info → Run anyway.

2. Press Record, frame your shot, hit Start.
3. While recording: Ctrl+Shift+Z to zoom in/out, Pause if you need a beat, Ctrl+Shift+X to stop.
4. Trim the ends, cut the fumbles, skim the idle parts, drop a text label or arrow, toggle click ripples.
5. Export → GIF or MP4 → Copy → paste it wherever the demo goes.

Keyboard shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
Ctrl+Shift+R	Start the record flow
Ctrl+Shift+Z	Zoom in / out at the cursor (while recording)
Ctrl+Shift+X	Stop recording (global)
Space	Play / pause
← / →	Scrub the playhead (Shift = 1s jumps, Home/End = trim bounds)
Arrow keys	Nudge the selected annotation (Shift = bigger steps)
Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y	Undo / redo any edit
Ctrl+D	Duplicate the selected annotation
Delete	Remove the selected annotation, zoom, speed region, or cut
Ctrl+S / Ctrl+O	Save / open a project
Ctrl+E	Export GIF / MP4

How it's built

SolidJS + Vite (editor UI)  ←WebSocket preview←  Rust engine
                                                  ├─ vuoom-capture   Windows Graphics Capture (any monitor)
                                                  ├─ vuoom-input     global input log (QPC-stamped)
                                                  ├─ vuoom-zoom      auto-zoom planner + spring camera
                                                  ├─ vuoom-render    wgpu compositor (zoom, text, shapes, overlays)
                                                  ├─ vuoom-encode    GIF encoding + size estimation
                                                  ├─ vuoom-project   .vuoom project model (undo-able edits)
                                                  └─ app shell       MP4 (Media Foundation), disk-backed
                                                                     frame store + crash recovery

The same render(t) path drives scrubbing and export, so what you preview is exactly what ships. While recording, frames stream straight to disk — clip length is bounded by your drive, not your RAM. Design docs live in docs/.

Building from source

pnpm install
pnpm tauri dev      # run locally
pnpm tauri build    # produce installers

Releases are built and published by GitHub Actions on every push to main; CI runs typecheck, clippy (deny warnings), and the full Rust test suite.

License

Apache-2.0. Free for everyone, forever — that's the point.