Starting, pausing and stopping

The keys

F9 starts and stops. F10 pauses and carries on.

Both work from anywhere, with any program in front. That is the whole point: you should not have to find Cilevi's toolbar in the middle of demonstrating something, because the hunt for it is in the video.

Pause is the underrated one. If something goes wrong, or the phone rings, or you need to set up the next part of the demonstration, press F10 rather than stopping. The recording carries on afterwards as one continuous take, with the pause simply not in it.

The buttons

The red button on the toolbar does the same as F9. While recording, the tray icon shows the elapsed time, and right clicking it gives you Stop Recording, Show Toolbar and Open Folder.

What happens when you stop

The file is finished and saved to your output folder, a notification tells you where, and the Creator Studio opens with the take already loaded, the background already applied and the zooms already built.

If you would rather just have the file, close the Studio. Nothing is lost: the recording is on disk, and you can open it again later from the Studio's Open Video button.

If something goes wrong mid take

The recording is written to disk continuously rather than held in memory and saved at the end. If Cilevi is killed, or the power goes, the file already on disk is a real video file for everything recorded up to that moment. It opens, it plays, and the Studio can repair the length and the index it never got the chance to write. You lose the last moment, not the take.