screenstudio-alt

A headless, open-source Screen Studio alternative — turn a raw screen recording into a polished demo from the command line (or your coding agent).

You record your screen as usual. screenstudio-alt does the rest — auto-zoom on clicks, fast-forward of idle time, keystroke chips, a smoothed cursor, and 9:16 vertical export — then hands you an mp4 (or an FCPXML for Resolve / Final Cut / Premiere). No GUI to click through, no subscription.

The editor: a raw recording (the "Run" button + search box) auto-zoomed on clicks, idle time fast-forwarded (8×), and keystrokes (hello_demo!) rendered as chips — all detected automatically, then tweakable on the timeline.

What it does

• 🔍 Auto-zoom onto clicks and typing bursts — eased, and crisp (re-samples the original frames, so zooms stay sharp)
• ⏩ Idle speed-up — dead time is compressed automatically; a playing animation is never sped up
• ⌨️ Keystroke chips rendered like real typing
• 🖱️ Smoothed cursor + click ripple + a real click sound
• 🏷️ Text callouts — screen-fixed labels that auto-flip light/dark to stay legible on any background and sit at the edges, off your content
• 📱 9:16 vertical that follows the action — plus 16:9 / 1:1
• 🛠️ Local timeline editor (drag zoom regions, retime idle spans) + multi-clip sequencing
• 🎞️ FCPXML export to Resolve / Final Cut / Premiere

One render pass on the same clip: auto-zoom, idle speed-up, smoothed cursor + click ripple, a framed backdrop, and background-aware callouts.

🥚 Easter egg: pass a BPM and it'll beat-cut your clips onto the music grid for a synced reel — a one-flag add, because the whole tool is scriptable.

Quickstart

It's a Claude Code skill — tell your coding agent to add screenstudio-alt and it installs and drives the whole thing. Or add it directly:

/plugin marketplace add connerkward/screenstudio-alternative-skill

Run it by hand (CLI)

pip install -r requirements.txt && brew install ffmpeg
swiftc -O src/events-log.swift -o src/events-log        # one time

# record (the logger captures clicks/keys/cursor; auto-zoom needs this — it can't be recovered from pixels)
./src/events-log demo.events.jsonl & LOGGER=$!
screencapture -v -V 30 demo.mov ; kill $LOGGER

# polish: auto-zoom + idle speed-up + keystroke chips + vertical export
python3 src/polish.py demo.mov --events demo.events.jsonl --speedup --zoom --keys --vertical

--speedup alone works on any existing recording (no events needed). Prefer a GUI? python3 src/studio.py demo.mov opens the local timeline editor shown above. Full internals → docs/ARCHITECTURE.md.

Why / vs Screen Studio

Screen Studio by Adam Pietrasiak is a gorgeous, beloved macOS app — that you click through, on a paid subscription. screenstudio-alt does the same signature effects headless and free.

Honest: if you want a polished native app and don't mind paying, Screen Studio is excellent — buy it. If you want to automate demo polish for free, or have a coding agent make demos, use this.

Lineage: in the spirit of VHS by Charm — scriptable, reproducible demos — but for full screen recordings, not just the terminal.

License

MIT © Conner K Ward

🧭 ckw-skills — part of Conner K. Ward's collection of Claude Code skills & MCP servers.