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Canvas editor

Walkthrough pending

This page will be expanded with frames from the walkthrough video. Use the kz-screenshot class to keep the brand-flat border treatment.

The canvas is the heart of Kartoza Screencaster — a WYSIWYG composer that shows you, in real time, exactly what your recording will look like. Drop in a screen, a webcam, a logo, an animated GIF, an intro sting; arrange them; record.

Adding elements

  • Screen — pick a monitor from the dropdown. You can add more than one monitor: the first becomes the primary background, and each additional monitor drops in as a movable inset you can place anywhere (for example side-by-side). Every screen previews live and independently.
  • Webcam — pick the camera you want to use. Add as many as you like; each camera is captured separately and composited at its own position, shape and crop.
  • Logo — drop a raster image (PNG, JPG, WebP, BMP) or an animated GIF. SVG isn't offered because FFmpeg can't render it into the recording; if you do drop an SVG it's rasterised to PNG automatically.
  • GIF — drop an animated GIF with an optional loop limit.
  • Intro / outro sound — drop a WAV or MP3 to play once at the start / end of the recording.

Recording multiple monitors

Each monitor is captured separately and the additional ones are composited as insets over the primary in the landscape recording, at their canvas positions and crop. On GNOME/KDE Wayland (portal capture) only the primary monitor is captured; the vertical/split output uses the primary screen.

Resizing and cropping

Select an element to reveal its handles:

  • Resize — drag a corner handle to scale proportionally, or an edge handle to stretch one axis. The scroll wheel scales too. Hold Shift on a text box to stretch it freely.
  • Crop — hold Alt. The handles turn Kartoza blue and now trim the element instead of scaling it: drag an edge to crop one side, or a corner to crop two sides at once. Cropping a webcam trims the region that is actually recorded, matching what you see.
  • Aim a webcam bubble — crop a round webcam down to a smaller circle, then hold Alt and drag the bubble body to pan the crop window across the camera feed until it frames exactly the part you want to show.

As you drag, elements snap to the frame edges, the frame centre lines, and other objects' edges and centres, with a guide line shown while a snap is engaged. Hold Shift to place freely without snapping. Everything stays within the recording frame, so nothing is ever dragged off the recorded area.

Pausing a live preview

Hover a monitor or webcam and a pause/continue button appears centred on it. Click it to freeze just that element's live preview — the others keep running. A paused element keeps its button visible so you always know it is frozen. This only affects the preview; it does not change the recording.

Layout modes

  • Landscape 16:9 — classic horizontal layout.
  • Vertical 9:16 — for Shorts / Reels / TikTok.
  • 9:16 split (left / right) — vertical with screen on one side and webcam-heavy column on the other.

Presets

Save the current canvas layout as a preset and load it on demand. Each preset captures every item position, size and per-item setting.