How to capture screen video on iphone

Question

If you want to record your iPhone or iPad screen, the process is simple -- whether you're nearing the rewarding conclusion to your favorite Apple Arcade game and you want to document it, or you're trying to walk a loved one through how to set up their new phone.

Table of Contents Show

Record your screen
Spice up a recording with audio
OK, I made a recording... now what?
How do you video capture your screen?

Of course, you can still take screenshots and use its tools to draw and annotate something on your screen, but there are times when a recording -- complete with audio -- is the better route. You'll need to have iOS 11 or a later update installed on your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, but that's the only requirement.

Before you can begin using the screen recorder tool, you'll first need to add the feature's button to the Control Center. On your iOS device go to Settings > Control Center > Customize Controls then tap the green plus button next to Screen Recording.

The Screen Recorder button will show a countdown (here it shows "2") after it's selected, allowing you to go to the app or screen you want to record.

Jason Cipriani/CNET

Record your screen

After adding the shortcut, you begin by opening Control Center. On iPhones older than the iPhone X ($300 at Amazon), get there by swiping up from the bottom of the screen. On newer iPhones, swipe down from the top-right corner of the screen.

Tap on the Screen Recording button, which will prompt a countdown inside the button followed by it turning red to indicate to begin capturing whatever's on your display.

You'll know when your screen is being recorded because there will either be a red bar across the top of your screen (on older iPhones) or the time will have a red highlight behind it (on newer iPhones). Tap on the red button or bar to stop recording.

With a long-press, you can opt to turn on audio recording so you can narrate your video.

Jason Cipriani/CNET

Spice up a recording with audio

What if you want to walk someone through how to use a feature or get past a bug you keep running into? Well, you can turn on your phone's microphone and have it record for as long as a screen-recording session is active.

To turn it on, open the Control Center and long-press on the Screen Recording button. A new menu will show up, with a toggle to turn your microphone on at the bottom. Tap on the Microphone Audio button, it will turn red and then select Start Recording.

The Screen Recording button turns red when your screen is being captured.

Jason Cipriani/CNET

OK, I made a recording... now what?

Once you stop recording, you'll be asked if you want to save the video to the Photos app. Open the Photos app to view, edit, crop, and share the video through Messages, email, or even post it to your favorite social network.

Apple delivered the ability to record your screen in iOS 11 a few years ago, but iOS 15 brought even more additions. We'll show you how to clean up your FaceTime video. And check out how to get a burner email address from Apple.

Want to capture your favorite movie scene and save them as still pictures? On an iPhone, you can do so without any third-party app. Just play the video or TV which you want to take a snapshot. Drag the slider to quickly jump to the point in the video you like to capture, then pause the video. Now press the Power+Home keys combination to do a screenshot. Your iPhone screen will flash and the screenshot will be saved to the ‘Screenshots‘ album in your Photo Library or Camera Roll. Using iPhone X without home button or can’t get the screen capture properly? Check out this tutorial to capture screen on iPhone.

This method however simply capture anything on your iPhone screen as an image in a fixed resolution and aspect ratio that are usually different from the source movie or video. All your screenshots are captured in the same width/height, it does not matter you are capturing a 4K UHD movie, 1080P HD video or a 360p video. Sometimes when your video can’t fill the full screen of iPhone, you will get the black areas around the video. If you take a screen of the video, you capture the black bars on the left/right or top/bottom as well.

A better way to take snapshots of your video and get high resolution still pictures is to use a video player or editor that offer the video snapshot feature. Here we’ll show you how to do so with video to photo grabber app. If you don’t have it already, download it here.

Free alternative to this paid app
We have found a free alternative to this paid app. Now you can use ImgPlay GIF Maker to extract frames from videos for Free on iPhone.

Run the video to photo converter app on iPhone. Grant it the permission to access your photo library. Browse through the video thumbs and select the video you want to take a snapshot from. Swipe up and down to browse the video frame by frame, or drag the slider at the bottom to quickly find the scene you want. Touch to select the scene or frame. Finally tap the Save button at the top right section to save the video snapshot to your Camera Roll. You can also select the Share option to share the video snapshot through other apps on iPhone.

Update Sep 2022: this article was originally published in April 2018; added the free alternative app which can also help us convert videos to photos, export frames from videos on iPhone.