SCREENSTUDIO-ALT
Screen-Studio-style post-production for screen recordings, headless.
Conner Ward built screenstudio-alt, a free, MIT-licensed, headless post-production tool for screen recordings that auto-zooms on clicks, speeds up idle stretches, draws keystroke chips, smooths the cursor, exports a 9:16 vertical cut, and writes FCPXML for Resolve, Premiere, or Final Cut — and ships as a Claude Code skill so you can ask an agent to "make the demo."
The thing that makes a screen recording look produced — the slow push-in when you click a button, the fast-forward over the boring parts, the little keystroke chips, a cursor that glides instead of jitters — is all post. Screen Studio popularized it as a paid macOS app. screenstudio-alt does the same class of polish, but headless and free: no window to click through, no subscription, and it runs end-to-end from a single command.
There are a lot of tools in this space, so the differentiation is specific: it's agent-native (say "make the demo" and a Claude Code skill drives the whole pipeline), fully headless (no GUI, scriptable in CI), free and MIT, and it exports FCPXML so the cut opens as a real timeline in your NLE instead of a flattened video. No single one of those is unique. The combination — agent-driven, headless, free, and round-trips to a professional editor — is the point.
How it works
The pipeline splits into capture and polish. At record time, a small Swift input logger records the timing of every click, keystroke, and cursor move alongside the raw screen capture — so the edit decisions key off real interaction data, not guesses from pixel diffs. After recording, a Python pass (ffmpeg + PIL) does the non-destructive polish: a spring-physics virtual camera pans and zooms over the original high-resolution frames, so a push-in stays sharp instead of upscaling a cropped region. Idle gaps get time-compressed, keystrokes become on-screen chips, and the cursor path is smoothed.
Nothing is baked until export. The intermediate is a timeline, which means a local NLE-style timeline editor lets you nudge any auto-decision by hand — move a zoom, change a speed-up, drop a callout — before you render. When you're done you export an MP4, a 9:16 vertical cut, or FCPXML that opens as an editable sequence in DaVinci Resolve, Premiere, or Final Cut.
Install
It ships as a Claude Code plugin/skill; the core CLI also runs standalone. Add the marketplace, then ask the agent to make a demo from a recording:
/plugin marketplace add connerkward/screenstudio-alternative-skill- Installs the skill into Claude Code. After that, "make the demo" runs the capture-and-polish pipeline; the standalone CLI exposes the same passes without an agent.
FAQ
What is screenstudio-alt?
screenstudio-alt is a free, MIT-licensed tool by Conner Ward for post-producing screen recordings, headless. It auto-zooms on clicks, speeds up idle stretches, draws keystroke chips, smooths the cursor, exports a 9:16 vertical cut, and writes FCPXML for DaVinci Resolve, Premiere, or Final Cut. It ships as a Claude Code skill, and the core CLI also runs standalone.
How is it different from Screen Studio and other screen-recording tools?
screenstudio-alt does the same class of polish as Screen Studio — auto-zoom, idle speed-up, smoothed cursor, keystroke chips — but the differentiator is the combination: it's agent-native (you say "make the demo" to a Claude Code skill), fully headless (no GUI, scriptable in CI), free and MIT-licensed, and it exports FCPXML so the cut opens as an editable timeline in a real NLE. No single one of those is unique; doing all of them together is the point.
How does screenstudio-alt work and where do I get it?
A Swift input logger captures click, keystroke, and cursor timing at record time; a Python + ffmpeg + PIL pass then does non-destructive polish, running a spring-physics virtual camera over the original high-resolution frames so zooms stay sharp. A local NLE-style timeline editor lets you hand-tweak any auto-decision before export to MP4, vertical 9:16, or FCPXML. It's open source at github.com/connerkward/screenstudio-alternative-skill; install in Claude Code with /plugin marketplace add connerkward/screenstudio-alternative-skill.