Cursor Smoothing and Click Effects: A Guide to Every Cursor Setting in ReScreen

Watch one of your own recordings on a phone and try to follow the pointer. It is a few grey pixels that skitter across the screen, vanish against a dark sidebar, and sit motionless on top of the sentence you are asking people to read. You knew where you were clicking. Your viewer is guessing. Cursor smoothing and click effects exist to close that gap, and the right values depend on what you are making and where it will be watched.

ReScreen records pointer movement and clicks as events while you record, then draws the cursor from those events in the editor. Nothing is burned in, so everything below can be changed after the take. Click detection needs the Input Monitoring permission, so grant it before you record. The controls sit in the Cursor tab, both in Settings (defaults for new recordings) and in the editor's inspector (the open project).

The Cursor section, setting by setting

Show cursor

Hides the styled cursor entirely. Use it for passages where the pointer adds nothing, such as a slideshow or a video playing inside the window.

Cursor size (50 to 300%, default 120%)

The pain here is simple arithmetic. A 4K display shown in a 1080p player halves every dimension, and a phone shrinks it again. The default 120% is a modest lift for landscape video on a computer. Dense tools such as IDEs and spreadsheets deserve 140 to 160%, and vertical clips 180% or more.

Size scales whatever shape the cursor has. ReScreen preserves real macOS cursor shapes, so an I-beam over text still looks like an I-beam and a resize handle still looks like a resize handle, only larger.

Smoothing: Raw, Natural, Smooth, Very Smooth

Hands are not steady. On a trackpad especially, the recorded path is full of tiny corrections that a viewer reads as nervousness.

• Raw: exactly what your hand did. Right for developers showing precise selection, and for anything where you draw or drag accurately.
• Natural (default): removes the jitter, keeps the character of your movement.
• Smooth: glides between targets. The polished look most product demos want.
• Very Smooth: the heaviest setting, with a slow, deliberate feel for cinematic launch clips.

Smoothing is applied to movement, not to interactions. Clicks and drags stay at their recorded positions, so the pointer is on the button when the button is pressed. Heavier smoothing does round off fast flicks, so if you move quickly between distant targets, Natural or Smooth will follow you more faithfully than Very Smooth.

Cursor shadow

A soft shadow under the pointer, on by default. Its job is contrast: a dark arrow over a dark theme is invisible without it.

Hide when inactive and Hide after (0.5 to 5 s, default 1.5 s)

When you stop moving to explain something, the pointer is usually parked on the very thing you are explaining. With "Hide when inactive" on, the cursor fades out after the "Hide after" delay and returns the moment you move.

If you talk a lot between actions, 1 to 1.5 seconds keeps the screen clean. If you use the pointer to gesture at things while speaking, raise it to 3 seconds or more so it does not fade mid-point, or turn the toggle off.

Which click effect should you use?

A viewer watching without sound, which is common on social feeds, has no other way to know a click happened. The "Click effect" picker has four options, and each effect expands and fades in about half a second.

• None: no marker. Fine when Smart Zoom is already announcing every click and you want minimal decoration.
• Subtle (default): a small, soft disc. Confirms the click without drawing the eye away from the interface.
• Ring: a larger outlined circle. Clear and unobtrusive at once, because it does not cover what is underneath. A strong choice for tutorials.
• Pulse: a larger filled disc. The most visible option, suited to small screens and fast cuts.

"Click color" takes a colour picker or a HEX value. Pick a colour that contrasts with the app you are recording, not just one from your brand guide: a violet ring disappears on a violet interface.

Recommended cursor settings by scenario

Tutorials reward clarity over polish, hence Ring and light smoothing. If that is your main format, the advice in how to make software tutorial videos customers finish applies to pacing and structure as well.

Save each row you use as a preset in Settings, under General, so the look is a single choice per video.

How the cursor works with zoom and camera

Cursor settings do not act alone. A zoom of 1.5× also enlarges the pointer by 1.5×, so a cursor sized for the un-zoomed view can look heavy when zoomed. If you zoom a lot, stay at the lower end of the ranges above; the Smart Zoom settings guide covers the zoom amount to pair it with.

The pointer also competes with your face for attention. If your camera sits near the area you work in, the webcam overlay shapes guide explains how to move it out of the way, automatically or by hand.

If you arrived here because viewers say they cannot follow your videos, the pointer is one of three causes. The full diagnosis is in what to do when viewers can't see what you click.

Next step: check it at the size your viewer sees

Set your values, then view the preview at roughly the size of a phone screen and watch thirty seconds without sound. If you can follow every click, the settings are right. Preview and export share one compositor, so what you judged is what gets exported. The feature overview is on the cursor and clicks page.

Every plan includes every cursor setting, with no watermark and no time limits. See the options on the pricing page, or download ReScreen for macOS and style the pointer after your next take instead of before it.