Smooth Capture can now be driven entirely from the terminal — by your scripts, or by AI coding agents like Claude Code. The demo below was produced end to end by an agent: it drove Apple Maps in the iOS Simulator, recorded the screen, wrapped it in a 3D iPhone with cinematic camera moves and zoom-ins, added background music, and exported the finished video — without a single click in the app.
Prompt to reproduce
Use Apple Maps in the iOS Simulator as a demo target and make a 20 second clip with SmoothCapture. Search the Golden Gate Bridge and fly to it, present it in a 3D iPhone with a few camera moves and zoom-ins, add background music, then export.
New Features
- Command-line control: scripts and AI agents can record the screen, generate smart zooms, apply editor presets, and export a finished video without opening the app. Off by default; enable it in Settings → General → “Command-line control”
- Terminal screenshots with the full editor treatment — backgrounds, padding, rounded corners, shadows, borders, and 2D bezels or full 3D device frames with HDR environments, rendered through the same pipeline as video exports so they match pixel-for-pixel
- Edit any video file: open MP4, MOV, or M4V footage from Finder, the Dock, or the Open Project panel — or
project import from the CLI — and style it with backgrounds, device frames, zooms, and export presets, even if Smooth Capture didn’t record it
- New
backgrounds, device-frames, and environments commands list every bundled look for screenshots and project edits
- A ready-made Claude Code skill teaches AI agents the full record → smart zoom → style → export workflow out of the box
- Multi-clip projects: start from an empty project, then add more clips or new recordings to it at any time
- Drag clips to reorder them on the timeline, with a single undo step to put everything back
- Per-clip audio mix: mute, volume, and delay for each clip — and microphone, system audio, and cursor settings can now be set per clip too
- Hard cut toggle on every effect block (zoom, camera move, camera layout, lens, annotation): switch it on to make the block snap instantly at its edges instead of easing in and out
- Stretch a screenshot clip to any length by dragging its right handle, and reset a clip’s edits in one click from its right-click menu
One command took this screenshot of the same Simulator session — cropped to the phone screen, wrapped in a 3D iPhone 17 Pro with an HDR environment:
smoothcapture cli screenshot --window 6866 \
--crop 0.0517,0.0701,0.8967,0.9129 \
--device-frame "3D/iPhone_17_Pro_Blue.usdc" \
--environment glasshouse_interior_2k.hdr \
--aspect 16:9 --output hero.png
Prefer a flat look? The same shot with a 2D bezel on a bundled gradient:
Prompt to reproduce
Take a polished screenshot of that same Apple Maps view. Wrap one in a 3D iPhone 17 Pro inside an HDR environment, and put the other in a flat 2D iPhone bezel on a gradient.
Improvements
- Smooth scene cross-fade between clips that use different device frames, and scrubbing across a transition now shows the true cross-fade
- iPhone 3D device frames load about 5x faster, with better lighting on 3D device models
- Chained camera moves now flow into each other smoothly instead of re-spinning
- Annotations fade in and out smoothly by default instead of popping on screen (redactions still appear instantly so hidden content is never revealed)
- The touch cursor is now a clean white translucent circle
- Headless exports now wait for 3D device models to finish loading, so command-line exports with 3D frames render correctly from the first frame
- Recording an iOS Simulator window automatically crops to the phone screen, switches to a touch-style cursor, and applies an iPhone device frame
Bug Fixes
- Device frame, crop, cursor, and audio edits can no longer get lost between clips, saves, and reloads
- Device frames now stay inside the screen area on every clip
- Full-length effects no longer shrink to the first clip when you change a segment’s speed
- The camera now glides smoothly when a manually framed zoom is followed by an auto cursor-follow zoom, instead of jumping at the boundary