How to edit a screen recording on your Mac

Your Mac records the screen with Shift-Command-5 and saves a .mov. QuickTime Player can trim and split that recording, and iMovie can crop it to 16:9 and change its speed, but neither puts it on a background with padding, rounded corners and a shadow, the look you see in app demos. Koi's Edit Video does: drag the recording with Shift held, drop it on Edit, pick a background and a shape like 16:9 or 9:16, cut the slow parts, and export.

We make Koi, so read the Koi part with that in mind. Everything about Koi here is what version 1.13 does. Apple's steps and Screen Studio's features and prices come from their own pages, checked October 21, 2026.

1. Press Shift-Command-5.
2. Choose Record Entire Screen, Record Selected Window (macOS Tahoe 26 or later) or Record Selected Portion.
3. Click Options to pick a microphone if you'll talk over it.
4. Click Record. To stop, click Stop in the menu bar or press Command-Control-Esc.

The recording is saved to your desktop as a .mov named Screen Recording, then the date and time. Apple's how-to has the rest. Record a window or a portion rather than the whole screen when you can: there's less to crop later, and no notifications in the corner.

• QuickTime Player: Edit, Trim to cut the ends, and View, Show Clips with Edit, Split Clip to cut it into pieces. No crop, no background, no speed.
• iMovie: trims, splits, changes speed with Preserve Pitch, and crops with a frame Apple says is constrained to 16:9. It's built for movies, so there's no padding, rounded corners or shadow round the video.

That's enough to send a raw recording to a colleague. For a demo on a landing page, a launch post or a vertical clip, you want an editor made for screen recordings.

Open it:

1. Start dragging the recording in Finder or on your desktop.
2. While you're still holding it, press and hold Shift, and drop it on Edit. Or click Edit a video in Koi's window and pick the file.
3. The editor opens: settings on the left, the video in the middle as the copy will look, the timeline along the bottom.

Frame it:

1. Under the video, pick the canvas's shape: Native, 16:9, 9:16, 1:1, 4:3 or 4:5.
2. In Background, pick an image (Koi's wave wallpapers, your Mac's desktop pictures or your own), a looping video, a colour or a gradient. The Blur slider softens it.
3. In Frame, set Padding to give the video room, Radius to round its corners in pixels, and Shadow to lift it off the background. Advanced sets the padding for each side.
4. In Crop, trim the Top, Bottom, Left or Right to hide the menu bar or the Dock. Or click Crop Video over the picture and drag.

Cut it:

1. Move the playhead and press C to split. Click a piece you don't need and press Delete (⌫).
2. Drag a piece's ends to trim it. ← and → step a frame at a time, Space plays.
3. Click a slow piece, like a page loading, and pick a speed from 0.25× to 30×. The sound keeps its pitch.
4. Mute a piece in its own panel, or the whole video with the speaker button.

Clean it and export:

1. In Redact, click Hide a part and draw a box over an email address or a name. It stays hidden for the whole video, under a blur or solid black.
2. In Details, leave out the date, the place and the device the file carries.
3. Click Export (Command-E). Pick MP4 or GIF, Low, Medium, High or Original with each size shown, Encoding Fast (H.264), Balanced or Quality (HEVC), and 24, 30 or 60 frames a second.
4. Click Export Video. “Name edited.mp4” lands beside the original.

Undo and redo (Command-Z and Shift-Command-Z) work the whole way, and Snapshot saves the frame under the playhead as a PNG for a thumbnail. Everything runs on your Mac. A background picture or video you add stays where it is: Koi only remembers where to find it.

Screen Studio is a Mac app built for this one job, and it does things Koi doesn't. It records the screen itself, watches where you clicked and zooms in on those moments, and smooths a shaky cursor into a steady glide. It has backgrounds, padding and shadows, and exports wide 16:9, square 1:1 and vertical 9:16. Its price is $29 a month, or $9 a month on the yearly plan, with 40% off for students and educators.

Koi's Edit Video doesn't zoom on clicks or smooth the cursor, and it edits a recording you already made rather than making one. What it adds is everything else on the wheel and in Koi, like dictation and call recording, under one plan. If auto-zoom is the look you need for product demos every week, Screen Studio is the better pick.

• Notifications sliding in. Turn on Do Not Disturb before you record, or hide them later with Redact.
• A tiny window on a huge canvas. Crop to the window first, then add padding, so the app fills most of the frame.
• Dead time. Speed up loading and typing, and delete the pauses.
• The wrong shape. Use 16:9 for YouTube and websites, and 9:16 for Reels, TikTok and Shorts, with the video on a background rather than cropped.

More: crop a video to 9:16, speed up part of a video, blur something in a video or make a GIF. The rest of the wheel is on the Shift wheel page. A still screenshot instead? Add a background to a screenshot.

The Mac's screen recorder, QuickTime and iMovie are free. Koi has no free plan: Pro is $20 a month, or $192 a year, after a 3-day free trial that needs a card. Lifetime is paid once, from $59. Edit Video uses no AI, so it never counts against Koi's usage. See the plans.