Automatic cursor zoom, highlighting and keystroke display for DaVinci Resolve,
driven by real recorded data instead of guesswork.
Free, for Windows. Made by VideoMetrixs.
Screen recordings are hard to follow. The cursor is a few pixels wide, the important detail is somewhere in a 4K frame, and the viewer has no idea which key you just pressed.
The usual fix is to zoom and highlight by hand, keyframe by keyframe. That is slow, and it has to be redone every time you re-cut.
These two tools do it from measured data instead.
VM Capture records your screen and, on every frame, writes down exactly where your cursor was, where you clicked, and which keyboard shortcuts you pressed.
VM Cursor is an OpenFX plugin for DaVinci Resolve that reads that recording and does the work for you:
- Zoom to your clicks. Every click becomes a zoom point, with easing you control. One button turns a whole recording into a cut.
- Highlight and magnify the cursor, with a magnifier loupe for fine detail.
- Replace the cursor with a larger, clearer pointer.
- Show keystrokes on screen, rendered into the picture so they survive the export.
- 3D perspective, screen pixels, tilt shift and camera shake, each able to fade in automatically as the shot pushes in, so a flat screencast gains depth without a single keyframe.
- Two on-screen graphs in the Resolve viewer for editing zoom points and keyframes directly, by dragging.
Because the plugin works from recorded data rather than analysing the picture, the tracking is exact. It does not lose the cursor, and it does not need a fast machine to follow it.
You can also use the plugin without VM Capture: add zoom points by hand on the graph in the viewer.
Every effect switches on and off from one place. Each has its own group below.
Screenshots of VM Capture
Five steps, in order, and then you record.
 |
 |
| 1. Which screen | 2. Frame rate |
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| 3. Naming | 4. Where to save |
5. Record. When you stop, the app hands you the log path and the exact steps for Resolve.
Get the latest ZIP files from the Releases page.
VM-Cursor-x.y.z.zip: the DaVinci Resolve pluginVM-Capture-x.y.z.zip: the screen recorder (optional, but it is what makes the automation work)
Before unzipping, right-click the ZIP, choose Properties, tick "Unblock", click OK.
Windows marks downloaded files as untrusted. Unblocking the ZIP clears that mark from everything inside it, and the tools then start without a warning. Skip it and you will see a blue "Windows protected your PC" screen, which you can pass with More info then Run anyway.
VM Cursor: copy VMCursor.ofx.bundle into
C:\Program Files\Common Files\OFX\Plugins\ (needs administrator rights), then restart DaVinci Resolve completely. The effect appears under VideoMetrixs in the Effects panel.
VM Capture: unzip anywhere and double-click VM Capture.exe. Nothing is installed: no Python, no ffmpeg, no admin rights. Delete the folder and it is gone.
- Record with VM Capture. Press F9 to stop.
- When it finishes, it shows you the log path and the exact steps for Resolve.
- In Resolve, drop VM Cursor on the clip, paste the log path into Cursor Log Path, park on the clip's first frame, press Sync To Playhead.
- Press Points From Clicks. Every click is now a zoom point.
- Turn the effects you want on in Main Controls.
Full walkthrough in the tutorial video.
| Operating system | Windows 10 or 11 |
| DaVinci Resolve | Developed and tested on Resolve 21. Older versions probably work, but are untested. |
| Resolve edition | Tested on Studio. The free edition should work, since OpenFX plugins are supported there, but this is untested. |
| Graphics | The plugin needs an NVIDIA GPU (it renders with CUDA). VM Capture works with NVIDIA, Intel or AMD, and falls back to the CPU. |
If you try it on a combination not listed here, I would genuinely like to know how it went.
The plugin assumes your screen recording fills the frame. On a vertical timeline a 16:9 recording is letterboxed, so it fills only a band in the middle, and everything the plugin positions goes to the wrong place. The cursor is the most obvious victim.
Until this is handled properly, edit at the recording's own aspect ratio and convert afterwards:
- Build a 16:9 timeline and edit normally, with VM Cursor doing its work there.
- Select the finished clips, right-click, New Compound Clip.
- Put that compound clip on your 9:16 timeline and frame it with Transform.
The plugin runs inside the compound clip, where the aspect still matches, so every effect behaves exactly as it does on a normal timeline. Reframing afterwards is also the more useful order, since you can choose what stays in the vertical crop.
The same applies to any timeline whose aspect ratio differs from the recording, not only 9:16.
VM Capture writes down keyboard input, so here is exactly what it does.
It records the screen you chose, the cursor position, mouse clicks, and keyboard shortcuts only: combinations using Ctrl, Alt, Shift or the Windows key, plus named keys such as F1 to F12, Esc, Tab, Enter, Delete and the arrows.
It cannot record ordinary typing. A letter, number or symbol pressed without a modifier key is never sampled at all. This is a limit built into the program, not a setting you have to remember. A password typed during a recording is never read in the first place.
Nothing leaves your computer. No account, no telemetry, no update check, no analytics. The app serves its interface on 127.0.0.1 so your browser can display it, and nothing outside your machine can reach it. Recordings go to the folder you chose and nowhere else.
For completeness: the app reads your mapped network drive list from the Windows registry, for one purpose, to turn a drive letter into its full network path so that saving to a network folder works.
VM Capture is packaged with PyInstaller, a common Python packaging tool. A small number of antivirus engines flag anything packaged that way, regardless of its contents, because self-extracting executables resemble the structure some malware uses.
A current scan result is linked on each release. Typically one or two engines out of about seventy report something, and none of the major ones do.
VM Cursor and VM Capture are free to use, including in commercial work. See LICENSE.
VM Capture includes FFmpeg, which is licensed separately under the GPL v3 and which does the video encoding. The release ZIP contains THIRD-PARTY.txt with the licence details and where to get FFmpeg's source code.
These are free tools released as they are, and I am one person, not a company.
Issues are turned off here. If something does not work, the tutorial video covers the common problems, and you can reach me through videometrixs.com.
If they save you time, subscribing on YouTube is the best thanks.
Made by Patrick Steger, VideoMetrixs.