The cursor in a recording

A screen recording can keep the pointer out of the movie, so Frame Job draws it on the clip and you can restyle it later, or have macOS draw it into the picture for good. You choose before you record, because the choice is part of the movie.

Menu: File ▸ New Recording…
Keys: ⌥⌘N
Where: New Recording panel ▸ CursorNew Recording panel ▸ Show Clicks
Agent tools: record_screen

Choose Separate or In the picture

Set Cursor on the recorder panel.

	Separate	In the picture
The pointer	Kept out of the movie. Frame Job draws it on the clip.	Drawn into the movie by macOS.
Restyle it later	Yes, in the clip’s Cursor section.	No. It can’t be changed or removed.
Show Clicks	Click ripples, drawn by Frame Job.	A ring drawn into the movie.
The Cursor section	Appears on the clip.	Doesn’t appear.
Cursor file	Written	Written

Separate is the default for every screen source: displays, windows and picked windows. Your choice is remembered, and once you’ve made one it holds for every source.

Both write a cursor file beside the movie, so Auto Zoom, shortcut overlays and Speed Up Typing work either way.

With Separate, the pointer appears wherever Frame Job draws the clip, in the preview and in every export. The movie file on its own has no pointer, so opened in another app it shows none.

Cursor is greyed out, keeping its value, with Camera or Microphone Only as the source, and while a recording is under way.

Show clicks

Show Clicks marks each mouse click. It’s off by default, and greyed out with Camera or Microphone Only.

With In the picture, macOS draws a ring around each click into the movie. It can’t be removed afterwards.
With Separate, nothing is drawn into the movie. Frame Job draws the ripples from the cursor file, and you can edit them afterwards.

What a Separate recording lands with

The clip gets a Cursor section on the Clip tab’s Picture sub-tab, with Frame Job’s arrow following the path the pointer took. See Style the recorded cursor for what you can change there.

With Show Clicks on as well, the clips land with Clicks set to Ripple, in the same undo step as the recording. In a new project where that’s the only other change, the undo step is called Cursor Clicks. Undoing it takes the ripples off and keeps the pointer.

Nothing else is set. To smooth the pointer’s path and hide it when it’s idle, choose Polish in the same section.

What an In the picture recording lands with

The pointer is in the movie and the cursor file says so, so the clip shows no Cursor section and nothing is drawn twice.

Good to know

If a Separate stretch’s cursor file couldn’t be written, that stretch has no pointer at all: it isn’t in the movie and there’s nothing to draw it from. It gets no ripples either. The panel’s note says so, with “The pointer is not in the movie either: it was recorded Separate.”

With an agent

record_screen takes cursor, either separate or in_picture, and leaving it out means separate. Its show_clicks is false unless the agent sets it. Neither can be used with a voice-over or a camera on its own. See Record with record_screen.