BackendStudio – Screen Recorder & Video Editor for Windows
Record your screen and edit the footage into a finished video — all in one native Windows app. Capture any display with system audio and microphone narration, drop your clips onto a multi-track timeline, cut, split, merge and arrange them, add effects and transitions, mix the audio, then export a single polished MP4. Playback is real time — press Play and the preview starts in about a quarter of a second, with no waiting for a render, however long the project is. Perfect for tutorials, demos, walkthroughs and presentations. Free to use, with a one-time Pro upgrade that removes the export watermark — it works entirely on your own machine and never uploads your recordings.
Download BackendStudio
Available on the Microsoft Store — free to use, with an optional one-time BackendStudio Pro upgrade. No subscription, no ads.
Or view the listing at apps.microsoft.com.
Free to use — with a one-time Pro upgrade
Every recording and editing feature is free — screen and webcam capture, the multi-track timeline, titles, transitions, effects and MP4 export. The free tier adds a small “Created with BackendStudio” watermark to your exported video (the preview stays clean while you edit); a one-time BackendStudio Pro upgrade removes it. Pro is a one-time purchase, not a subscription.
Record and edit in one place
No more juggling a separate recorder and editor. BackendStudio captures your screen and lands the recording straight in the media bin, ready to trim and arrange on the timeline — then export a finished MP4. Everything runs on your PC; your footage never leaves the device.
Changelog — what’s new in each release
Full release history — screen recording, the multi-track timeline, editing, titles, export, real-time playback, the Effects and Transitions panels with 58 blend transitions and privacy blur regions, per-property keyframe animation with a transport bar, and pause/resume, countdown, global hotkeys, crash recovery and the freemium Pro upgrade.
View the full changelogUser Guide — every step explained
A plain-English walkthrough of recording, importing, the timeline, splitting & trimming, effects, transitions, audio, playback, exporting and projects — and the keyboard shortcuts.
Read the User GuideFeatures
🎥 Screen Recording
Record any display at your chosen frame rate, with system audio, microphone narration and an optional webcam/camera overlay — ideal for tutorials and reaction-style demos. Start with a pre-record countdown, pause and resume mid-take (paused time is dropped from the finished video), and drive it all with system-wide hotkeys so you never alt-tab into your own shot. Smooth constant-frame-rate capture keeps audio and video in sync, and each recording drops straight into the media bin ready to edit.
🎬 Multi-Track Timeline
Arrange your footage on a professional multi-track timeline — stacked video and audio tracks with a ruler, playhead and zoom. Drag clips to position them, trim with edge handles, and snap to the playhead and neighbouring clips (hold Shift to snap freely).
✂️ Cut, Split, Merge
Split a clip at the playhead, copy and paste, merge adjacent pieces back together, and move clips between tracks. Editing is non-destructive — your original files are never modified — and everything is covered by full undo/redo.
📥 Import Your Own Media
Bring in existing video, audio and images by drag-and-drop or a file picker. The media bin shows a thumbnail, resolution and duration for each item, with waveforms for audio — so you always know what you’re grabbing.
▶️ Real-Time Playback
Press Play and the timeline plays immediately — about a quarter of a second, whether the project runs thirty seconds or thirty minutes. Nothing is rendered to a file first and nothing is written to disk, so there is no progress bar between you and your edit. Anything genuinely too heavy to composite live is quietly rendered ahead in the background while you’re paused, and a thin bar under the ruler tells you where you stand before you press Play.
🔊 Audio Mixing
Set per-clip volume, add fade in and fade out, and mute or solo whole tracks. All audio is mixed down into a single clean track on export, honouring your mute/solo choices.
🖼️ Clip Adjustments & Keyframes
Fine-tune each clip from the Inspector — reposition, scale and rotate a clip for picture-in-picture, set its opacity for overlays, tweak colour (brightness, contrast, saturation, temperature and hue), crop any edge, change playback speed, and dial in volume and fades. Position, Rotation and Opacity can each be animated with keyframes on their own independent schedule — a key button beside each property shows whether it’s animated, and a transport bar steps straight from keyframe to keyframe. Stacked video tracks composite in order, so overlays sit exactly where you want them.
🎬 Titles & Transitions
Add titles to caption your video — the Titles panel lists every label in the project with its start time, so one click jumps you to it. Smooth the joins between clips with a crossfade or a slide, fade the whole video in from black and out to black, or crossfade every cut on a track in one go. And for real two-clip transitions there are 58 blends — wipes, pushes, circle crops, radial, pixelize, blur and zoom — which mix the two pictures together rather than just fading one over the other.
🎨 Effects & Looks
Grade a clip in one click with a Look — Warm, Cool, Punchy, Faded, High contrast or Black & white — then fine-tune it. Blur, sharpen, vignette, hue, colour temperature and mirror / flip (the usual fix for a webcam that records you the wrong way round) are a tile each, and per-clip crop trims any edge. Every effect on a clip is listed with its current values, can be switched off without losing its settings, and can be copied and pasted onto another clip.
🕶️ Privacy Blur Regions
The one for tutorial recordings. Draw a box over an API key, an email address or an account number and it’s hidden in the export — blurred or pixelated, your choice per box. Drag and resize them right on the preview, and give each one its own stretch of the clip so a value that’s only on screen briefly doesn’t cost you the whole shot.
📤 One-Click Export
Render the entire timeline into a single file at your chosen resolution and frame rate — MP4 (H.264 or H.265/HEVC), MOV, WebM or an animated GIF. Export is hardware-accelerated — it uses your PC’s graphics hardware for fast rendering, and falls back to a built-in encoder on machines without one — with a live progress bar and a Show in folder button when it’s done.
💾 Projects, Autosave & Recovery
Save your work as a project file and pick up where you left off. A friendly welcome screen offers New / Open / Recent, autosave quietly protects your progress, and crash recovery offers to restore unsaved work after an unexpected close.
⌨️ Keyboard-Driven
A dense, professional light-theme layout modelled on pro editing tools, with keyboard shortcuts for the whole workflow — new/open/save, import, split, ripple delete, copy/paste, merge, play/pause, markers and undo/redo — so editing stays fast. Ctrl + mouse wheel zooms the timeline around the pointer, so the edit you’re lining up stays under the cursor as you zoom into it.
🔒 Private by Design
BackendStudio works entirely offline — no account, no cloud upload, no telemetry. Your recordings and projects stay on your machine. Ideal for internal demos, confidential walkthroughs and anything you’d rather not send to a web service.
💸 Free, with One-Time Pro
BackendStudio is free on the Microsoft Store — every recording and editing feature unlocked, no subscription and no ads. Free exports carry a small “Created with BackendStudio” watermark; a one-time BackendStudio Pro upgrade removes it. Just download it and start recording.
Screenshots
The editor — recording options with camera preview, composite preview, the multi-track timeline, and the clip Inspector
Latest Release
Version 3.0 — August 2026
Playback is now real time. Pressing Play no longer renders a video file first — the timeline is decoded and composited as it plays, so the preview starts in about a quarter of a second whether the project runs thirty seconds or thirty minutes, and replaying a stretch you’ve already watched is instant. The Effects and Transitions panels are real panels now too, bringing 58 two-clip blend transitions, one-click Looks, privacy blur and pixelate regions, per-clip crop, and new blur, sharpen, vignette, hue, temperature and mirror effects. Also in 2.2: a Titles panel that lists every label in the project, and Ctrl + wheel timeline zoom.