How to Turn a Screen Recording into a Step-by-Step Guide

A colleague asks how to do the thing. You already recorded it — but they want a doc, not a five-minute video. The tedious answer is to screenshot the recording frame by frame and paste the images somewhere. The quick one, on a Mac: capture the steps straight out of the recording and export A4 pages as a PDF or PNG. Here's the whole loop.

Two ways to make a guide

• Re-perform the workflow in a click tracker (Scribe, Tango). It captures every click as you redo the process. Good if you have nothing recorded yet — but it's a second run-through, and the guide it produces is separate from any video you made.
• Capture from the recording you already have. The screenshots are frames of the video, so the guide and the video always agree, and your zooms, blurs and captions come along with them. This is what ScreenTailor's Step-by-Step Guide mode does, and what the steps below cover.

Turn a recording into a guide, step by step

1. Record the process once. Hit the shortcut, drag the region, and walk through the workflow at your own pace — fumbles and dead air get cut in a moment. New to this? Start with how to screen record on a Mac.
2. Edit it as you normally would. Trim the pauses, zoom into the small clicks, and blur anything private. Whatever you do here shows up in the guide's images — so edit for the reader, not just the viewer.
3. Caption the key moments. Put a caption where each step happens: "Open Settings", "Paste the key", "Save". Full walkthrough: how to add captions to a screen recording.
4. Switch to Step-by-Step Guide. Use the toggle at the top of the editor. The video stays on the left; the page preview appears on the right.
5. Generate the steps. Press From captions — you get one step per caption, each captured while that caption is on screen, in order. Or scrub the seek bar and press Capture step to grab a frame by hand. Mix both freely.
6. Arrange the pages. Drag a step to move it, click the × to drop it, and pick a layout. The page preview updates as you go.
7. Export. PDF for something you hand over as one file; PNG pages for pasting into Notion, Confluence or an email. Both are saved next to the recording — the MP4 and the written version stay together.

Write captions like instructions

This is the trick that makes the whole thing fast. Because the captions are burned into the frames, they are the step labels in the document — so write them as instructions the first time round: short, imperative, one per action ("Click Export", not "and now we're going to go ahead and export"). Do that while editing the video, and the guide is one button away.

The same captions still do their day job in the video: readable with the sound off, styled once with caption presets.

Pick a page layout

• A4 landscape, one step per page — the default. 16:9 screen captures fill it with almost no wasted margin, so the screenshots are as large as they can be.
• A4 portrait, one step per page — for documents that live among other portrait pages.
• A4 portrait, two steps per page — a denser handout; good when the reader is going to print it and follow along.

Images are fitted to the page — never cropped, never stretched — and pages are numbered for you.

What you can't do

Worth knowing before you start, so the guide comes out the way you expect:

• No per-step text field. Steps are images. The wording has to be in the frame — i.e. in your captions. If you need real paragraphs between screenshots, export PNG pages and write around them.
• The PDF's text isn't searchable. Pages are embedded as images, so nothing in them can be selected or indexed. What you get in return: the page looks exactly like the preview, in any language, with no font problems.

Frequently asked questions