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Problem using Quicktime Screen Capture for longer content

When I try to make longer screen capture recordings (one hour +) using Quicktime Player on my MacBook Pro 2014 Retina running Big Sur 11.5.2 all it ends up capturing when the content ends is a screenshot. Short screen recordings seem to work fine. There is no error message and no communication from Quicktime or MacBook about hitting a memory limit for attempts where the recording fails. There just is no captured video at the end, only a screenshot. This is very frustrating when I sat through the same 2 hour lecture video thinking the QT recording was set perfectly and then there is no recorded video. It's ridiculously complicated enough to use Quicktime to capture screen video as you have to add Blackhole audio processing software separately but Apple never tells you that. You have to figure it out for yourself when there is no audio on your first few screen captures. Does anyone know how to hack this or even what the memory limit of video recording is?

MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 11.4

Posted on Aug 23, 2021 11:22 AM

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10 replies

Aug 23, 2021 1:57 PM in response to doubleodd

yes, your hardware should be more than sufficient for screen recordings. and since you've confirmed using "desktop" as the "save to" location, i'm not sure in what direction to go as far as further trouble shooting.


i'm thinking you should download and run the free version of EtreCheck so we can see if you have some software installed that is causing your issue. make sure you give "full disk access" to etrecheck. read how to use it by reading Using EtreCheck. if you need help interpreting the report, you can see how to post the report here by reading How to use the Add Text Feature When Posting Large Amounts of Text, i.e. an Etrecheck Report. and it automatically obscures sensitive things (like serial numbers) so you don't have to worry about sharing the report here.

Aug 23, 2021 12:08 PM in response to doubleodd

i now use "desktop" as a save to location for my screen recordings. i've previously had issues trying to save recordings of more than 1 hour directly to an external drive.(or other locations) since i started using the desktop to save to, i haven't had any issues with my larger recordings. and no issues moving them to external drives once they have been saved. my longest recording to date was 4.5 hours. no hiccups.

Aug 23, 2021 12:25 PM in response to doubleodd

Sorry I don't know what happened. Apple Forum is saying problem solved but it's NOT!


Thanks @jeffreythefrog I have been saving to desktop so that's likely not where I'm going wrong. Good to know you are able to save 4+ hours of video/audio. Could it be that I'm recording too much of the screen and thus exponentially increasing the file size of the video portion? I tried reducing the video playback window to pretty small size but had the same problem for longer video. However, when I recorded a very short (60 sec) of this video the file size was about 35MB and it saved properly. A 120 minute file of that would be a multi-gigabyte file. Again, Quicktime throws no error messages at all during recording long videos, there just isn't a video there at the end. I'm baffled.

Aug 23, 2021 12:33 PM in response to doubleodd

doubleodd wrote:

Could it be that I'm recording too much of the screen and thus exponentially increasing the file size of the video portion?

no, i definitely do not think that is the issue. when i did the 4.5 hour recording (the spacex crew 1 launch) i wanted to watch it streamed to my TV at the same time i was recording it. i did so with my mac in full screen mode. and my mac is the 27" iMac 5K. the recording ended up at right about 85GB in size. i saved it to desktop and later moved it to an EHD.

Problem using Quicktime Screen Capture for longer content

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