How to make a tutorial video on a Mac: screen, camera and zooms

How do you make a good tutorial video?

A good tutorial teaches one task, shows every step clearly enough to copy, and never makes the viewer hunt for where to look. Most weak tutorials fail on the last point: the button that matters is tiny, and the viewer is on a phone.

Plan before you record:

Name the result first. "By the end you will have a working invoice template" tells the viewer why to stay.
List the steps, not the script. Bullet points keep your voice natural; a word-for-word script makes most people sound read.
Clean the screen. Close notifications, hide the bookmarks bar, use a fresh browser profile and a large font.
Decide the shape now. A tutorial posted as a vertical short needs a smaller window and bigger text than one made for YouTube.
Leave a beat after each click. The viewer needs a moment to see what changed before you talk about the next thing.

This is what a tutorial needs, part by part, and how Sharpy handles each:

Part	What the viewer needs	What Sharpy does
The screen	Text big enough to read on a phone	Checks the text will read in the shape you chose before you record
The pointer	To see where you click	Redraws the cursor smooth, landing exactly on each click, with click rings
The detail	A close look at the control in use	Proposes a zoom on what you click, type into or name
Your face	A person to trust, not just a desktop	Records your camera with the screen, and can set you over it with no green screen
Waiting	Nothing	Cuts waiting, slow typing and mistakes without clipping a word
Secrets	Never to see them	Blurs keys, tokens, emails, card numbers and password fields on every frame
Navigation	To skip to the step they need	Chapters and captions from the corrected transcript

How do I make a tutorial video on my Mac?

Apple's own recorder (Shift-Command-5) captures the screen faithfully and stops there; how to screen record on a Mac covers it in full. Sharpy records and edits in one place:

Choose the shape first. Pick 16:9 for YouTube or 9:16 for a short. Sharpy sizes the window, checks that the text will read on a phone and tells you before you press record.
Bring up the teleprompter. It shows your script or step list and the actions you expect to take.
Record screen, sound and camera together. The screen, the Mac's own sound, your microphone and your camera record at once, with Continuity Camera or an iPhone over USB as the camera. Your cursor, clicks and keys are recorded as data beside the picture.
Choose what the keyboard shows. Shortcuts show on screen by default. Single keys or all typing are a choice per recording, plain typing is stored only as timing, and nothing at all is kept while a password field has focus.
Let it cut and zoom. Sharpy cuts the dead time, proposes the zooms, redraws the cursor and blurs secrets.
Check the edit, then export. Captions, voice clean-up and chapters come from the corrected transcript, and one recording renders 16:9, 9:16, 1:1, 4:5, 2:3 and 21:9, each with its own camera path.

Sharpy asks only for Accessibility permission, and never at first launch. Every recorder capability is also an agent tool, so Claude or Codex can run the same recording and edit, and the agent can perform the demo itself if you want it to.

How do zooms follow what you click, type and say?

A zoom in a tutorial says "look here". Done by hand, it is dozens of keys a video. Sharpy reads the recording for what matters at each moment:

The control you clicked. Clicks are recorded as data, so the zoom aims at the exact button.
The field you are typing in. The frame moves to the focused field while you type.
The words you say. Say "now open Settings" and the words are matched to the text on screen, so the zoom lands on Settings.
Scrolling. Sharpy zooms back out when you scroll, so the viewer keeps their place.

Each zoom is proposed and you confirm it once. The agent places them with zoom_to(region, from, to). Where it measures sharper, Sharpy records through a 2x virtual display, so a zoom has real pixels to land on rather than an enlarged blur.

A young man at a café table clicks a trackpad on his laptop, the screen soft and out of focus, a coffee cup at his elbow in morning light. — Viewers follow the pointer, so a zoom on the thing you click shows them where to look before you say it.

For a recording made elsewhere, push in by hand: key the crop, and cropping in over a shot is a push in. A push-in is exposed with film's 180-degree shutter by default, so it smears like a camera move instead of stepping. OBS recordings come in as they are, without re-encoding, and Screen Studio projects open in Sharpy.

How do you keep passwords and API keys out of a tutorial?

Sharpy blurs API keys, tokens, email addresses, card numbers and password fields on every frame they appear on, following scroll and zoom, down to a single word of a secret inside a line.

For anything else you want covered for the whole edit, such as a client's name in a window title, hide it once and the cover follows it as the shot moves. Blurring a face, a logo or a number plate, the previous lesson, covers that tool.

How do you edit the screen and the camera together?

The camera keeps a tutorial human. Three layouts work:

Picture in picture. You in a corner with rounded corners, which Sharpy's rounded rectangle mask draws round in the picture's own pixels whatever its shape.
You over the screen. Sharpy finds the person in the camera picture with no green screen. Choose keep the person, and the room is cut away so the screen shows behind you.
The screen in a device. Set the recording inside a phone, tablet, laptop, desktop display or browser window with no maker's marks, on a gradient, a picture, a plain colour or a blur of the recording itself. Ask for a move by name: a pull back, a push in to a point of the screen and out again, a float, a tilt or a turn, each moving on a spring like Screen Studio's.

For coding tutorials, code blocks show your own code highlighted, typed on, diffed, morphed or scrolled, in nineteen languages and eleven themes, with tokens that stay between states moving rather than vanishing.

Sharpy paces a tutorial with a beat after each click, and in the words view you delete a fluffed sentence like text, picture and sound together; editing by editing text is that lesson.

What should you check before you export a tutorial?

Watch it on a phone. If you squint at any step, add a zoom there.
Read the captions. They come from the corrected transcript, so product names and commands should be spelled as on screen. Fix a misheard word once and it is fixed in the picture and the subtitle file.
Check the chapters. Chapters go into the file as a list players read, and into the description as YouTube timestamps where YouTube's rules allow them; where they do not, Sharpy says so. YouTube asks for at least three timestamps, starting at 00:00, with each chapter 10 seconds or longer.
Leave screen colours true. A look over the edit leaves screen recordings untouched by default, so interface colours stay as they were.

The next lesson, multicam editing, covers cutting between camera angles, and Sharpy vs Screen Studio compares the two recorders feature by feature.

Frequently asked questions

How long should a tutorial video be?

As long as the task takes to show clearly, and no longer. Cut the waiting and the mistakes, and split a long process into chapters, or into several videos if each part stands alone.

Do I need a webcam in a tutorial?

No, but a face helps people trust the teacher. Sharpy records the camera with the screen, so you can decide later whether to show it in a corner, cut out over the screen, or not at all.

Can I record a tutorial for TikTok or Shorts and YouTube at once?

Yes. One recording renders 16:9, 9:16, 1:1, 4:5, 2:3 and 21:9, each with its own camera path, and Sharpy warns where text would be too small in a shape.

Is my screen recording uploaded anywhere?

No. Recording, zooms, blurring, captions and the render all happen on your Mac.

Sources

Checked on 18 October 2026.