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Add a background to a screen recording

Two minutes. Chrome or Edge, on any operating system. No account, no upload.

A raw screen recording is a rectangle of someone else's interface, edge to edge. Put it on a background with a little space around it and a shadow underneath, and it turns into a picture of a product. That is the whole trick, and it is what Kape does.

Kape is a free web app. It opens the recording from your disk, does the work in the browser tab, and writes the MP4 back to your disk. Nothing is uploaded.

Open the studio →

Steps

  1. Open the studio and drop the recording in. MP4, MOV and WebM all work. Kape reads the file and says plainly if your browser cannot decode it. If you have not recorded yet, the Kape Recorder extension for Chrome records a tab, a window or the screen and opens the result in the studio.
  2. Choose a background. Open the Background panel. Pick a Wallpaper from the set, a Gradient, a plain Colour, or an Image of your own. Blur it and lower its opacity if it competes with the recording.
  3. Give the recording room. In the Frame panel, raise the Padding until the background shows on every side. Round the corners with Radius if you like.
  4. Add a shadow. In the Shadow panel, set the offset, blur and opacity. A soft, low-opacity shadow lifts the recording off the background without drawing attention to itself.
  5. Pick the output shape. The Output aspect control sets the frame: wide 16:9 for YouTube and the web, 1:1 for a feed, 9:16 or 4:5 for phones. The recording stays sharp and is never stretched.
  6. Export. Press Export. Kape encodes every frame from the source, not from the screen, and writes the MP4 to disk as it goes. A long recording costs time, not memory.

What Kape does not do

Kape does not zoom in on the cursor or smooth its motion, and it does not add captions. It does background, frame, shadow, crop, trim and export, and it does them for free on any operating system. If you need cursor effects, a paid desktop app like Screen Studio does that.

Other guides

Kape is made by Kaltër Technologies. It is free, runs in your browser, and uploads nothing. Privacy.