🧩Skills library

A skill is a reusable editing recipe. It looks at your project — your clicks, your microphone, your markers, your brand — and applies a set of ordinary edits for you: zooms, cuts, titles, layout or export settings. Every edit a skill makes is a normal edit you can inspect, change or undo, and every skill can be switched off again in one click.

#Using skills

1. Open the Skills tab

   In the editor, click Skills in the left panel. Every built-in skill and your custom skills are listed with a switch.

2. Switch a skill on

   Turn the switch on. The skill runs immediately and shows what it did — for example "14 clicks found · 9 zooms added". The edits appear on the timeline.

3. Adjust the results

   Skill-made items are ordinary items. Drag a zoom, rename a chapter, delete one you don't want.

4. Run it again, or switch it off

   Run again replaces the skill's previous result with a fresh one (useful after you've cut more footage). Switching the skill off removes everything it added, puts back anything it cut, and restores settings it changed.

#How switching off works

Swamp Dragon records exactly what each skill did: the items it created, the ranges it cut, and the settings it changed. Switching the skill off reverses precisely those changes:

• Items it added (zooms, titles, blurs) are removed — even if you moved or restyled them.
• Footage it cut (Trim silence) is put back. If you haven't edited the clips since, the timeline returns exactly to how it was; if you have, the removed source ranges are restored next to the clips they came from.
• Settings it changed (webcam layout, frame, export) return to their previous values.

Edits you made yourself are never removed.

#Built-in skills

#Zoom to click

Turns every recorded click into an eased zoom toward the click and back out — the single most useful edit for tutorials.

• Each zoom starts 0.4 s before the click, so viewers see where you're about to click.
• Clicks close together are grouped into one zoom that follows the latest click, so the view doesn't bounce in and out.
• Clicks in parts you've cut are ignored. In region recordings, click positions are mapped into the region.
• If clicks weren't captured (for example without the macOS Accessibility permission), the skill uses places where the cursor rested for about a second instead.

#Circular webcam

Sets the webcam to a bottom-right circle with a 4 px border, a soft shadow and a 0.4 s fade-in. Switching it off restores your previous webcam layout.

#YouTube tutorial

Sets export to MP4 (H.264), 1080p, 30 fps, high quality — a reliable choice for screen content on YouTube and most course platforms. Switching it off restores your previous export settings.

#Chapter card

Places an animated full-frame chapter card at every marker, using the marker's label as the title. With no markers, it adds a single title card with the project name at the start. Add markers with M and rename them in the inspector first.

#Trim silence

Finds quiet gaps in your microphone track and removes them from every track at once, keeping a little breathing room around speech. Great for tightening a talk-through recorded in one take.

#Show shortcuts

Shows every keyboard shortcut you pressed (like ⌘⇧P) as a clean on-screen label at the moment you pressed it. Only modifier + key combinations are ever recorded; ordinary typing isn't.

Needs keyboard capture: on macOS that means the optional Accessibility permission was granted when you recorded.

#Blur region

Adds a privacy blur over the whole video. Select it and drag the dashed box on the preview over the area to hide, then trim it on the Blur lane to the time it's needed.

#Brand outro

Adds a closing card with the dragon mark, your brand name and tagline, on your brand color, and sets the frame background to the same color. Set the name, tagline and color in Settings → Brand.

#Custom skills Pro

Combine built-in skills into your own recipe — for example Trim silence → Zoom to click → Circular webcam → Chapter card → YouTube tutorial — and apply your whole house style in one switch.

1. Open the builder

   Go to Skills in the sidebar and click New skill.

2. Name it

   Give it a name and an optional description, such as "Weekly product update".

3. Add steps

   Click Add step, choose a built-in skill, and adjust its settings (for example Trim silence with a −35 dB threshold). Reorder steps with the arrows; remove with ×.

4. Save and use

   Click Save skill. It appears in every project's Skills tab as "Custom · N steps".

A custom skill runs its steps in order and is tracked as one skill: switching it off reverses all of its steps together. Custom skills are stored on your computer in custom-skills.json in the app's data folder; edit or delete them from the Skills page.

#Skills and AI assistants

With full MCP integration Unlimited, an assistant can list skills (list_skills), run one with custom settings (apply_skill) and switch one off (remove_skill). For example: "Trim silences longer than one second, then zoom to every click at 2×."

#Recipes

#FAQ

Why does Zoom to click say "No cursor data in this recording"?

Cursor metadata was off, or you recorded in Window mode (which doesn't capture cursor metadata). Turn Cursor metadata on in Home and record in Display or Region mode.

Why is a skill's switch showing a plan name instead?

That skill needs a higher plan. See Pricing.

I edited the zooms a skill made. Will switching it off remove them?

Yes — items a skill created are removed when you switch it off, even if you changed them. If you want to keep some, duplicate them first (⌘D); duplicates belong to you, not the skill.

Can I change a built-in skill's settings without building a custom skill?

Build a one-step custom skill with your settings Pro, or ask an assistant over MCP to run the skill with your parameters.