The free way: QuickTime and Float on Top
QuickTime Player can show your camera in a window that stays above everything else. Record the whole screen and that window is in the file.
- Open QuickTime Player and choose File → New Movie Recording. Your camera appears in a window. Do not press its record button – that would record the camera alone.
- Choose View → Float on Top, so the camera window stays above your other windows.
- Drag a corner of the window to make it small, and move it to a corner of the screen.
- Press ⇧⌘5, choose Record Entire Screen, set the microphone under Options, and record.
That is it: one video file with your screen and your face, made entirely with what ships on every Mac.
Where the QuickTime trick falls short
- It is a rectangle with window controls. The controls appear whenever the pointer passes over the camera window, and that shows in the recording.
- It is one more window to manage. It can end up under a dialog, or out of view when you present from an app in full-screen mode, which lives in its own Space.
- Position and size are by hand every time you set it up.
For an occasional recording, none of this matters much – use QuickTime. It starts to matter when you record every week and want the same clean result each time.
On a live call: Presenter Overlay
Since macOS Sonoma, Macs with Apple silicon have Presenter Overlay. While you share your screen in FaceTime or another supported video app, you turn it on from the video menu in the menu bar, and viewers see you in a movable bubble over what you share – or larger, beside it.
It is a good answer for calls. It is built for calls rather than for ordinary screen recordings, and it needs a supported app and Mac, so check Apple's support page for your setup.
Recorders with a camera built in
Most dedicated screen recorders – Loom, Screen Studio and others – can record your camera alongside the screen, often as a bubble you place in a corner. If you already use one of them, that is the simplest route: the camera is part of the tool you record with anyway.
What to check before choosing one for this: whether the camera can be moved or resized while you record, whether the result is one file or separate tracks to combine, and whether the price is a subscription.
A bubble drawn on the screen
The other approach puts the camera on the screen itself, as a circle above everything else. Because it is part of the screen, any recorder captures it and any full-screen share shows it, so the same bubble works in a recording, on a call and in a live class.
Gaze works this way. The webcam bubble drags anywhere, resizes from medium to large and can be mirrored or not; you zoom and frame the camera once and it stays that way. It sits in the same layer as Gaze's zoom, keystrokes and drawings, and on macOS 15 or later Gaze can record all of it in one take. The bubble is part of Gaze Pro; for an occasional recording, the QuickTime method above costs nothing.
Placement, size and mirroring
- Put it where nothing happens. A bottom corner is the usual spot, but many apps keep buttons there. Move it when it covers what you are about to click.
- Smaller than you think. Viewers need to see that a person is talking, not read your expression in detail. The content is still the main event.
- Mirroring is taste. A mirrored image feels natural to you because it matches a mirror. An unmirrored one is how others see you, and text on a shirt or a book reads the right way round.
- Light from the front. Face a window or a lamp, not a bright screen behind you. A small bubble exaggerates bad light.
- Camera at eye level and a glance at it during the intro and the summary. The rest of the time, looking at your screen is fine – that is what viewers are looking at too.