Lumae

Lumae is a free native Mac app for recording, editing, and exporting polished screen demos and annotated screenshots. It is designed around the small production tasks that make a raw capture easier to follow, including zoom timing, cursor motion, framing, captions, and voiceover. Rather than sending a recording to a browser editor, Lumae keeps capture, transcription, editing, and rendering on the Mac. There is no account, upload requirement, watermark, or project limit in the current beta. It fits developers, product teams, educators, and support writers who need a clean visual explanation without turning every short walkthrough into a full video editing project.

Recording starts with a display, window, or selected area. Lumae can group clicks that happen close together into an automatic zoom, leading into the first click and lingering after the last, while manual zooms can be placed and aimed on the timeline. The app hides the captured pointer and redraws a smoother path with movement tilt and a visible click response. Camera motion uses sampled shutter-style blur rather than a simple blur filter. Solid and gradient backgrounds, padding, corner treatment, and shadows provide the framed look commonly used for product demos, while the canvas can be previewed at 60 or 30 frames per second.

The editor supports trimming, splitting, reordering, importing, and stitching clips. A single take can be recorded again without disturbing the rest of the timeline, which is useful when one step changes after the main demonstration is already assembled. Voiceover is recorded while the timeline plays, and the original clip audio can duck under the narration with gradual ramps. Captions are transcribed on the device through Apple's speech models, broken into readable lines around pauses and sentence endings, and edited inline. Lumae keeps the original media inside its project package and represents edits separately, so editing does not repeatedly rewrite the source recording.

Screenshot work is handled with similar care. A global shortcut or the menu bar can capture a display, window, or area and open the result in an annotation editor. Arrows, boxes, ellipses, highlights, mosaic blur, text, and numbered steps remain editable instead of being painted permanently onto the pixels. Screenshots can use the same background and frame treatment as recordings, then be copied or exported as PNG at their own pixel density. This makes Lumae useful for release notes, bug reports, tutorials, and support documents as well as video, especially when a short sequence needs both still images and a recorded walkthrough in a consistent style.

A built-in Model Context Protocol server gives Lumae an unusual automation path. From the app's settings, a user can connect Claude Code, Codex CLI, Claude Desktop, Cursor, or another MCP client. The agent can list and read projects, cut clips, add zooms, write captions, import media, and undo changes in the project that is open. Each request arrives in the live editor as one undo step, so automated edits remain visible and reversible. Natural-language planning inside Lumae is marked as upcoming, and recording, screenshot capture, and export are not yet exposed to agents. The current MCP value is therefore focused on editing existing material rather than operating the entire production loop unattended.

Privacy is a central part of the product's current design. Recordings, screenshots, rendering, and caption transcription remain local and work offline. Lumae says its network activity is limited to a daily update check and anonymous usage counts, with the usage reporting switch available in privacy settings. Projects are stored in the Movies folder as Lumae packages containing original media and a small JSON edit description. Video exports support MP4 or MOV with H.264 or HEVC, and screenshots export as PNG. There is intentionally no cloud upload or built-in share link, so finished files need to be distributed through another service.

Lumae is currently free with no card or account, but it is also labeled as a beta and requires macOS 26.0 or later. That unusually high system requirement excludes older Macs and operating systems. Webcam overlays are not available yet, while competing recorders may be further along in capture and sharing features. Users must also grant the normal macOS screen recording permission, with microphone access requested separately when it is enabled. Within those limits, Lumae is a substantial native editor rather than a thin recorder. Its combination of automatic presentation polish, editable screenshot markup, local processing, non-destructive projects, and reversible agent-driven edits gives Mac users a focused way to produce demos without a subscription or cloud workflow.