What a recording saves besides the picture

A Cilevi recording is not only a video. While it runs, the app is also writing down what you did, and almost everything clever in the editor is built from that list rather than from the pixels.

What is written

Where the pointer was, many times a second, with the exact moment. This is what lets the editor draw a smooth pointer of its own: it is interpolating a real path rather than guessing one from a blurry video.

What shape the pointer had. An arrow, an I-beam over text, a hand over a link, a resize arrow on a window edge. Twelve shapes in all, and the editor draws the one you really had at that instant.

Every click, with the moment, the place and which button. This is the list the automatic zooms are built from.

Every key press. The editor can then draw the key combinations you pressed over the video, which is exactly what a tutorial about keyboard shortcuts needs. This is on out of the box; Record key presses for keystroke overlays in the settings menu turns it off if you would rather it was not written down at all.

Why it matters

None of this can be recovered from a finished video afterwards. A video is pixels, and working out from pixels that the user clicked here at 4.2 seconds is guesswork that no product does reliably.

That is also why importing somebody else's video into Cilevi gives you an editor with backgrounds and captions but no automatic zooms and no drawn pointer. The information was never recorded.

If the file goes missing

Keep the companion file next to the video, with the same name. If you move the video on its own, the Studio will still open it, but with none of the above. Both files together are the take.