QuickTakes

QuickTakes is a free, native macOS screen recorder built around one idea nothing else on the Mac does: takes. Instead of recording a long session and then scrubbing back to hunt for the attempt that actually worked, you flag each segment Good or Bad as you record — and when you stop, the editor has already stripped the bad takes and lined up only your keepers. Record. Mark takes. Keep the good ones.

The workflow is the whole point. Start a new take at any moment with Option-S, then mark the one you just did: Option-G if you nailed it, Option-B if you flubbed it, with an on-screen toast confirming every call. The editor auto-strips the bad takes and exports only the good ones as clean, cut clips — non-destructively, so your original recording is never touched and only the final export re-encodes. For anyone shooting a tutorial, lesson, demo or course who needs a few runs to land each line, it turns editing from a post-production chore into something that is already done the moment you hit stop.

Capture is properly pro. Record a full display, a single window, or a draggable region, at true physical pixels for crisp native-resolution text and UI, in H.264, HEVC or ProRes up to 60fps. It records system audio plus microphone, toggles the cursor, runs a cancelable countdown, and writes constant-frame-rate, crash-resilient files. Menu-bar controls and global, reassignable hotkeys — Option-Cmd-R to record, Option-S/G/B for takes — drive the whole thing without breaking flow, and the hotkeys work in the background with no Accessibility permission required. Creators get more: record the webcam to its own separate file, and live-stream to OBS through a built-in local server.

It is private by design — a native, sandboxed Mac app with no tracking and no account; nothing you record ever leaves your machine. And it is genuinely free: every feature is included, with an optional one-off or monthly tip to support development that unlocks nothing extra.