How to Screen Record on Mac With QuickTime Player

QuickTime Player is the screen recorder already on your Mac, and for a quick capture it is the fastest option available. Open it, choose File → New Screen Recording, pick your area, click Record. There is nothing to install and no account to make.

There is one thing worth knowing before you start, because it makes most older guides confusing: since macOS Mojave, New Screen Recording no longer opens a QuickTime window. It hands you the system Screenshot toolbar — the same one ⇧⌘5 opens. Apple's documentation describes it exactly that way. If you have read instructions about a red Record button inside a floating QuickTime panel, that interface has not existed for years.

This guide covers the whole workflow: recording, what the Options menu actually controls, where the file ends up, how to trim it, and the handful of reasons QuickTime refuses to record at all.

Everything below is written for macOS Ventura (13) through macOS Tahoe (26).

Quick answers

How do I record my screen in QuickTime?

1. Open QuickTime Player from your Applications folder, or search for it in Spotlight (⌘Space).
2. Choose File → New Screen Recording, or press ⌃⌘N. The Screenshot toolbar appears at the bottom of the screen.
3. Choose your capture area with the toolbar buttons: Record Entire Screen, or Record Selected Portion, which gives you a resizable frame to drag around what you want. On macOS Tahoe 26 and later there is a third button, Record Selected Window, which highlights whichever window you point at and captures that one on its own — cleaner than drawing a region around it.
4. Click Options to set your microphone, save location, timer and whether mouse clicks are shown. These are covered below.
5. Click Record. If you set a timer, you get a countdown first.
6. Use your Mac normally — the toolbar disappears while recording.
7. Click the stop icon in the menu bar when you are finished.

What the Options menu controls

Click Options before you record. Everything in here is set per recording, and some of it is easier to get right up front than to fix afterwards.

• Save to — where the finished recording lands. Defaults to QuickTime Player when you start from QuickTime, which is not the same as saving it. See where recordings go.
• Timer — None, 5 or 10 seconds of countdown before recording starts. Useful for getting to the right window first.
• Microphone — set to None by default, which is why so many QuickTime recordings come back silent. Only microphones are listed; there is no option for the sound your Mac is playing.
• Show Floating Thumbnail — the preview that appears in the corner when you stop. Handy, but it delays the file being written while it is on screen.
• Remember Last Selection — reuses your previous capture area.
• Show Mouse Clicks — draws a dark circle around each click. Worth switching on for anything instructional; viewers otherwise cannot tell when you clicked.

What is the difference between screen recording and movie recording in QuickTime?

QuickTime has three separate recording modes, and they do not combine. You can see all three in the File menu:

• New Movie Recording (⌥⌘N) records your camera.
• New Audio Recording (⇧⌘N) records a microphone on its own, saved as .m4a.
• New Screen Recording (⌃⌘N) records your display.

The practical consequence is that QuickTime cannot record your screen and your camera at the same time. There is no setting for it — the modes are mutually exclusive, so a talking-head bubble over a demo is not something QuickTime can produce. That is the most common reason people outgrow it.

How to stop a QuickTime screen recording

Click the stop icon in the menu bar, at the top right of the screen.

You can also press ⌃⌘Esc. If the icon is not where you expect it, or the recording will not stop, there is a dedicated guide to stopping a Mac screen recording.

Where does QuickTime screen recording go?

This is the step that loses recordings, so it is worth being precise.

When you start from QuickTime Player, the Save to setting defaults to QuickTime Player. Your recording opens in an untitled QuickTime window when you stop — but it is not on disk. You have to save it yourself with ⌘S and choose a location. Quit without saving and it is gone.

When you start the same toolbar with ⇧⌘5 instead, Save to defaults to the Desktop and the file is written automatically.

Either way the result is a .mov file. If you save to the Desktop or Documents and have iCloud Desktop & Documents switched on, it syncs to iCloud like anything else there.

The simplest habit is to set Save to → Desktop or Other Location... in Options before recording, so the file just appears when you stop.

How do I trim a QuickTime screen recording?

QuickTime includes a small amount of editing, which is enough to cut the dead air at the start and end.

Open the recording and choose Edit → Trim (⌘T). A yellow trimming bar appears — drag either end to set your start and finish, then click Trim.

The same menu offers a few more operations:

• Split Clip (⌘Y) cuts the recording at the playhead, so you can delete a section from the middle.
• Rotate and Flip fix orientation.
• Remove Audio strips the audio track entirely.
• Add Clip to End... appends another file.

What it will not do is zoom, add captions, blur anything, or cut to a camera. For that you need an actual editor.

Why won't QuickTime record?

• Missing screen recording permission. The most common cause by far. Go to System Settings → Privacy & Security → Screen & System Audio Recording on macOS Sequoia (15) and later, or Screen Recording on Ventura and Sonoma, and switch on QuickTime Player. macOS often requires you to quit and reopen QuickTime before it takes effect. Permissions can also be reset by a macOS update, so this is worth rechecking after one.
• A black rectangle instead of the content. This is copy protection, not a bug. Netflix, Apple TV+ and other DRM-protected players deliberately blank out during capture, and no screen recorder on macOS can record them.
• The recording is silent. Almost always the Microphone setting sitting on None. That, and the system audio problem behind it, is covered in the QuickTime audio guide.
• Not enough disk space. Screen recordings are large, especially at Retina resolution over several minutes. macOS will stop a recording when the disk fills, and a long recording of a 5K display can consume several gigabytes.
• The wrong display. With more than one monitor, Record Entire Screen captures the display you clicked on. Click on the screen you actually want before starting.

Recording with audio

QuickTime records a microphone once you select one under Options → Microphone, and it does not record the sound your Mac itself is playing under any setting.

That second half is the thing most people are actually asking about, and it needs a virtual audio driver to work around. The full explanation, the BlackHole setup, and why the popular Aggregate Device trick fails, are all in QuickTime screen recording with audio.

When you need more than QuickTime

QuickTime is genuinely good at what it does. Its limits are consistent, and you tend to hit all of them at once as soon as a recording is meant for other people rather than for yourself:

Tella's Mac screen recorder records your screen and camera as separate streams, so the layout stays adjustable afterwards instead of being baked in, and finishes with a shareable link rather than a large file to find somewhere to put. If you are comparing options more broadly, there is a roundup of the best screen recorders for Mac.

The short version

File → New Screen Recording in QuickTime opens the macOS Screenshot toolbar. Set your microphone and save location under Options before you record, because both default to something you probably did not want — None and QuickTime Player respectively. Stop from the menu bar, save with ⌘S if you started from QuickTime, and trim with ⌘T. The two things QuickTime cannot do at all are your Mac's system audio and screen-plus-camera together.