Screen Recording — Talk Someone Through a Swing

Sending someone a clip of their swing is easy. Getting them to see what you see is the hard part. You can type "your hips are sliding" into a text message, but they're looking at the same video they've already watched ten times and it still looks like a golf swing to them.

Screen recording closes that gap. Hit record, then work through the swing the way you would if the two of you were standing at the range together — scrub to the top, pause at impact, flip the overlay on, point at the hip line — and talk over it while you do. What comes out is a video of your review with your voice on it. Send that instead, and they don't have to guess what you meant.

What is a screen recording, exactly?

It's a video of the app itself, with your narration, rather than a video of a golf swing.

Everything you'd normally do alone in Video Review — scrubbing frame by frame, stepping through the filmstrip positions, toggling the pose skeleton, drawing a line, jumping between panels — gets captured as you do it, along with whatever you say into the microphone. The result is one .mov file that plays anywhere.

This is a different thing from the swing clips your camera records. A swing video is footage of a golfer; a screen recording is footage of you explaining the footage.

Does it record my voice?

Yes — and this is the whole point of the feature, not a footnote. MotionEdge records your microphone on both iPhone/iPad and Mac. Talk normally while you scrub and your narration lands in the file, in sync with what you were doing on screen.

Two things to know about the audio:

• The first time you record, the system asks for microphone permission. Say yes. If you turned it down earlier, your recordings will be silent — turn it back on in Settings → Privacy & Security → Microphone → MotionEdge on iPhone or iPad, or System Settings → Privacy & Security → Microphone → MotionEdge on Mac.
• App audio is deliberately left out. If the swing clip you're scrubbing has range noise on it, that audio doesn't make it into the screen recording. You get your voice, clean, with nothing competing with it. That's a choice, not an oversight — narration is easier to follow without a soundtrack under it.

How do I start a screen recording on iPhone or iPad?

Two ways in, and they differ only in which session the finished recording gets filed under.

From the swing you want to talk about — this is the one to use most of the time:

1. Open the swing (Sessions tab → tap a session → tap a swing, or the All Swings tab → tap a swing).
2. Tap the overflow menu (⋯) in the top-right of the Video Review screen.
3. Tap Screen Recording.
4. A small green ▶ Start pill appears near the top of the screen, next to an ✕ to back out. Nothing is being recorded yet — get your panels, overlays, and starting frame set up exactly how you want them first.
5. Tap ▶ Start. A red border frames the screen and the pill becomes a red ⏹ button with a running timer.
6. Do your review. Talk.
7. Tap the red ⏹ to stop.

From the Home tab, if you want to record something other than one specific swing:

1. Go to the Home tab and scroll to the bottom.
2. Tap Make a Screen Recording (just above the Settings row).
3. Same two-step flow — ▶ Start, then ⏹ to stop.

Recordings started from Home are filed under your General session.

The green pill, the red border, and the timer are drawn in a layer the recorder can't see, so none of the recording controls appear in the finished video. Your recording looks like the app, not like the app with a stop button stuck on it.

How do I start a screen recording on Mac?

Three ways in:

• Menu bar: File → Record Screen… (⇧⌘R)
• From a swing: open the swing, then the overflow menu (⋯) in the top-right of the Video Review window → Screen Recording
• Home: the Make a Screen Recording row at the bottom of the Home view

Any of them puts a small floating Control Screen Recording panel on screen with a timer and a Start button. As on iPhone, nothing is captured until you click Start — set your windows up first. Click Stop in the same panel when you're done. The control panel is excluded from the capture, so it never shows up in the video.

Recordings started from the menu are filed under whichever session you currently have selected, or General if none is.

macOS needs two permissions the first time: Screen Recording and Microphone. If either is missing, MotionEdge tells you which one and offers to open System Settings for you. Both live under System Settings → Privacy & Security, and the app to enable in each list is MotionEdge.

What exactly gets captured?

This is the one real difference between the platforms, and it's worth knowing before you hit record:

So on Mac, tidy up before you record: close what you don't want on camera, and turn on Do Not Disturb unless you want a text message from your buddy appearing over your student's swing.

A few smaller details:

• The Mac recording includes the cursor, which is genuinely useful — you can point at the hip line while you talk about it.
• Mac captures at up to 1920×1080 (scaled to keep your display's shape) at 30 frames per second. iPhone and iPad capture at the device's full screen resolution.
• Recording stops on its own on Mac if the display goes to sleep or the display you were capturing gets disconnected. MotionEdge tells you why and keeps what it captured up to that point.

Where does the recording go when I stop?

Straight into your library as a saved item, and MotionEdge opens it for you immediately so you can check it before sending.

Finding it again later:

• It lives in the session it was recorded into, alongside that session's swings.
• In the All Swings tab, tap the Screen Rec filter chip to show only screen recordings.
• Cards for screen recordings carry a small record-circle badge (⏺) so you can pick them out in a list.
• Its name is Recording — <date and time> unless you rename it.

Tapping a screen recording opens a straightforward video player, not the swing analysis screen. That's on purpose — there's no skeleton or filmstrip to compute on a screen recording, because it's already a recording of exactly that.

How do I share it?

The share button (⬆︎) in the top-right of the playback screen. That's the standard iOS and macOS share sheet, so the recording goes wherever you already send video — Messages, Mail, AirDrop, Instagram, a shared photo album, Slack, Drive, anywhere.

The person on the other end just gets a video file. They don't need MotionEdge, an account, or anything else installed — it plays in whatever they already use to watch videos. That's the practical advantage of a screen recording over sharing the session itself: it reaches people who aren't MotionEdge users at all.

When the recipient is a MotionEdge user and you want them to have the actual data rather than a video of it, use one of the other two paths instead:

• Export the session as a .mef file — one file with every swing, video, measurement, and analysis, opening on their device with everything intact.
• Share the session over iCloud — you both work in the same live session and see each other's comments and changes as they happen.

Screen recording, .mef, and shared sessions aren't competing options — they're for three different recipients. A screen recording is the one that works for anybody.

Does a screen recording sync to my other devices?

Yes, if you have iCloud Sync turned on (a MotionEdge Pro feature — see iCloud Sync — How It Works). A screen recording is stored the same way a swing video is, so it syncs across your iPhone, iPad, and Mac like everything else, and it's included when a session is exported as a .mef file.

Because it's stored like a swing video, Optimize Local Storage treats it the same way too — an older recording can be kept in iCloud and re-downloaded on demand to free up space on the device.

How long can a recording be?

MotionEdge doesn't put a stopwatch on it. The real limits are your device's free space and your listener's patience.

For what it's worth, the useful ones are short. Thirty seconds to two minutes covers one clear point — here's the position, here's what's wrong, here's what to feel instead. Anything past that and the person watching stops absorbing and starts skipping.

Two practical notes: a full-screen recording is a bigger file per second than a trimmed swing clip, so a ten-minute recording is a genuinely large video to text someone. And on Mac, plug in or keep an eye on the battery — screen capture with a live encode is not a light task.

Does screen recording cost anything, or count against the free tier?

Screen recording itself is free. It's part of the free tier, not a Pro feature — see MotionEdge Pro — What's in the Free Tier.

One thing to be aware of on the free tier: a finished screen recording is saved as an item in your library, so it counts toward the free 25-item library cap and toward the ten-a-day capture count, the same as a swing would. If you made a recording purely to send to someone and you don't need to keep it, delete it once it's out the door — deleted items sit in the Recycle Bin and don't count against either limit.

Pro removes both caps, and Pro is also what turns on iCloud Sync, which is what gets your recordings onto your other devices.

Is this the same as the 720p recording setting?

No — and these two are easy to mix up, so it's worth being explicit.

Changing your camera to 720p has no effect on screen recordings, and screen recordings have no effect on your swing footage. Different features, different settings, different purpose. If you came here looking for the storage-saving camera setting, that article is over here.

Tips for a recording worth watching

• Set the screen up before you tap Start. The two-step Start flow exists exactly for this — get the panel layout, the overlay, and the starting frame right first, so the recording opens on something meaningful instead of thirty seconds of you finding it.
• Say the position out loud. "This is the top" and "this is impact" cost you a second each and save the viewer from working out where they are.
• One point per recording. Two short recordings about two things beat one long one about both.
• Scrub slowly. What reads fine when your thumb is on the scrubber is a blur to someone watching passively.
• Draw while you talk. A line on the video plus "see how that shifts" is far clearer than either one alone.
• Watch it once before you send it. MotionEdge opens the recording as soon as you stop. Ten seconds of checking that your voice actually made it in saves the follow-up message.

See also: Sharing an entire session with a .mef file when the recipient uses MotionEdge. iCloud Sync for live shared sessions. Video Review — Reading Your Swing for what all the panels and overlays you'll be narrating actually do.