ShipClip

ShipClip

A native macOS screen recording app that handles recording, editing, and sharing in one place. Record your screen, camera, and audio as independent tracks, polish with professional effects, and share with a link — no Electron, no cloud dependency, no bloat.

🌐 shipclip.app

The Problems

1. Bloated tools: Most screen recording apps are Electron wrappers or cloud-first SaaS products that feel sluggish and phone home constantly.
2. Post-production pain: Getting polished results (zoom-to-click, camera PiP, click indicators) usually means bouncing between multiple apps.
3. Privacy concerns: Many recording tools upload your content by default or require accounts just to record.

The Solution

ShipClip handles the full workflow natively on macOS — capture, edit, and export without leaving the app.

Recording — Full screen or single window at 60 FPS. Screen, system audio, microphone, and camera are captured as completely independent stems for full control during editing.

Timeline editing — Non-destructive split, delete, mute, and solo operations with waveform visualization. Per-track volume control and audio mute regions. Draggable playhead and automatic time ruler scaling.

Visual effects — Zoom-to-click with configurable zoom level (1x–3x) and smooth cubic easing. Click indicators with color-coded pulses (left/right click), optional click sounds, and cursor pulse animation. Custom cursor rendering with type detection (arrow, I-beam, pointer, resize).

Camera PiP — Draggable picture-in-picture overlay recorded at 1080p. Background effects including Gaussian blur, person segmentation via Vision framework, solid color replacement, and full background removal. Keyframe-based positioning over time. Configurable size, corner radius, and frame styling.

Screen styling — Canvas padding, rounded corners, and backgrounds (solid color, linear gradient with angle control, or custom image).

Export — MP4 (H.264 + AAC) at native resolution and 60 FPS by default, with configurable resolution and frame rate for smaller file sizes and better web performance.

Sharing — One-click upload to shipclip.app with shareable links and a web player. Local export to ~/Movies/ShipClip/ always available.

Technical Stack

• App: Swift, SwiftUI, ScreenCaptureKit, AVFoundation, Metal for GPU-accelerated compositing, Vision framework for person segmentation
• Backend: .NET 9 Web API with PostgreSQL, Stripe billing, S3/R2 storage
• Frontend: Next.js + shadcn/ui for the landing page, account management, and web player
• Infrastructure: Docker on Kubernetes (k3s), CI/CD via GitHub Actions
• Updates: Sparkle auto-update framework with EdDSA-signed, notarized DMGs

Architecture

ShipClip uses a stem-based architecture where each input (screen, system audio, mic, camera) is recorded independently and composed at playback and export time. A custom AVVideoCompositing implementation handles real-time effects rendering — the same Metal compositor powers both the timeline preview and the final export, so what you see is exactly what you get.

Sessions are stored as discrete stems (screen.mov, system_audio.m4a, mic.m4a, camera.mov) with a session.json manifest and auto-saved edits.json for non-destructive editing state.