Recording Tips

Capture a screen recording that analyses well, on Android, iOS and desktop

Depth:

Intermediate

A good recording beats any amount of analysis. Hand the person recording the part that fits their situation.

For any recording

Keep still around the action. Leave the screen still for about half a second before and after it; that gives clean start and end pictures.
One thing per recording when measuring an animation.
Turn on Do Not Disturb. A notification sliding in during an animation corrupts the measurement.
Record at 60 fps or more. Frame rate matters more than resolution.
Measure from source when you can. Compose Animation Preview in Android Studio, and the Animations panel in Chrome DevTools, show the real durations and curves. A curve fitted from video is the fallback when there is no source.

Android

adb shell settings put system show_touches 1          # draw taps (bug reports)
adb shell screenrecord --bit-rate 8M /sdcard/rec.mp4  # Ctrl-C to stop
adb pull /sdcard/rec.mp4
adb shell settings put system show_touches 0

Length and size. screenrecord stops after 180 seconds by default; --time-limit N sets another limit, and from Android 14 --time-limit 0 removes it. --size WxH lowers the resolution, which is fine for bug reports.
Avoid --bugreport for this tool. It burns the wall-clock time and a frame counter into every frame, so every frame registers as a change unless you crop the overlay out with --roi or the crop flags. It also adds an info page to the recording.
From the desktop: scrcpy --record rec.mp4 --show-touches records the device screen from your computer, with timestamps captured on the device.
Slowed animations, for exact timing. Set the scale, record, set it back to 1, and analyse with --time-scale 5:
```
adb shell settings put global animator_duration_scale 5
# record the animation
adb shell settings put global animator_duration_scale 1
```
Some animation systems ignore the scale. If the result looks about 5× too fast, the app’s animations did not follow it; analyse without --time-scale. See Slowed capture for which outputs the factor converts.
Logs alongside, for bug reports:
```
adb logcat -c && adb logcat -v threadtime,epoch,usec > log.txt &
```
Running adb shell date +%s.%N right before you start recording gives an approximate start time for lining frames up with log lines — see Audio and logs for why it is approximate.
Jank or design? Stutter can be dropped frames rather than the intended motion. A Perfetto trace with the android.surfaceflinger.frametimeline data source (Android 12 and later) shows expected against actual frame timing.

iOS

On a device: Control Center → Screen Recording.
In the Simulator: xcrun simctl io booted recordVideo rec.mov.
Slowed animations: Simulator → Debug → Slow Animations slows things by a fixed factor. Measure an animation whose duration you know first, to confirm the factor before using --time-scale.

Desktop and web

Any recorder that writes MP4 or WebM at 60 fps works: OBS, wf-recorder, or ffmpeg -f x11grab.
For web animations, the Chrome DevTools Animations panel gives exact values. Slowing playback there (25 % or 10 %) also helps when you record.

Recording Tips

For any recording

Android

iOS

Desktop and web

See also