screenstudio-alt is an open-source, headless Screen Studio alternative (a Claude Code skill): auto-zoom, idle speed-up, and vertical export from the command line.
Turn a raw screen recording into a polished, Screen-Studio-style demo — auto-zoom on clicks, idle speed-up, keystroke chips, smoothed cursor, 9:16 vertical — headless, from the command line or your coding agent.
Screen Studio by Adam Pietrasiak is a gorgeous, beloved macOS app — that you click through, on a paid subscription. screenstudio-alt does the same signature effects headless and free.
| 🆓 screenstudio-alt | 💎 Screen Studio | |
|---|---|---|
| 💰 Price | Free, open-source (MIT) | Paid subscription ($9–20/mo; free to use, paywalled on export) |
| 🖥️ Interface | CLI + local web editor | Polished native GUI |
| 🔍 Auto-zoom on clicks | ✅ | ✅ |
| ⏩ Idle speed-up | ✅ | ✅ |
| ⌨️ Keystroke chips | ✅ | ✅ |
| 🖱️ Smoothed cursor | ✅ | ✅ |
| 📱 9:16 vertical | ✅ | ✅ |
| 🏷️ Text callouts (bg + location aware) | ✅ | ❌ |
| 🎬 FCPXML handoff | ✅ | ➖ partial |
| 🤖 Headless · scriptable · CI · agent-driven | ✅ | ❌ |
| ✨ GUI polish & ease-of-use | rougher | best-in-class |
Honest: if you want a polished native app and don't mind paying, Screen Studio is excellent — buy it. If you want to automate demo polish for free, or have a coding agent make demos, use this.
Lineage: in the spirit of VHS by Charm — scriptable, reproducible demos — but for full screen recordings, not just the terminal.
- 🔍 Auto-zoom onto clicks (and typing bursts) — eased, and crisp (re-samples the original frames)
- ⏩ Idle speed-up — dead time compressed automatically; a playing animation is never sped up
- ⌨️ Keystroke chips rendered like real typing
- 🖱️ Smoothed cursor + click ripple + a real click sound
- 🏷️ Text callouts — screen-fixed labels that auto-flip light/dark to stay legible on any background and sit at the edges, off your content
- 📱 9:16 vertical that follows the action — plus 16:9 / 1:1
- 🎬 Non-destructive render — zooms re-sample the source, so they stay sharp
- 🛠️ Local timeline editor (drag zoom regions, retime idle spans) + multi-clip sequencing
- 🎞️ FCPXML export to Resolve / Final Cut / Premiere
One render pass: auto-zoom, idle speed-up, smoothed cursor + click ripple, a framed backdrop, and background-aware callouts — the labels in the clip are the callouts feature labeling the others.
🥚 Easter egg: type a BPM and it'll beat-cut your clips onto the music grid for a synced reel. That kind of feature is a one-flag add because the whole tool is scriptable — on-the-fly expandability is the point.
It's a Claude Code skill — tell your coding agent to add screenstudio-alt and it installs and drives the whole thing. Or add it directly:
/plugin marketplace add connerkward/screenstudio-alternative-skill
Run it by hand (CLI)
pip install -r requirements.txt && brew install ffmpeg
swiftc -O src/events-log.swift -o src/events-log # one time
./src/events-log demo.events.jsonl & LOGGER=$!
screencapture -v -V 30 demo.mov ; kill $LOGGER
python3 src/polish.py demo.mov --events demo.events.jsonl --speedup --zoom --keys --vertical--speedup alone works on any existing recording (no events). Prefer a GUI?
python3 src/studio.py demo.mov opens a local timeline editor. Full internals →
docs/ARCHITECTURE.md.
MIT © Conner K Ward
🧭 ckw-skills — part of Conner K. Ward's collection of Claude Code skills & MCP servers.