Guide · Windows 11 · Updated October 2026
Recording a YouTube tutorial on Windows
A good tutorial is mostly preparation. The recording itself takes minutes; the time goes into retakes and editing. This workflow keeps both short. It works with any recorder; the Glidewright part comes at the end.
1. Plan in bullet points
Write down the steps you will show, one line each. Not a script – a list you can glance at. Try the whole thing once without recording. You will find the step you forgot.
2. Prepare the screen
- Turn on Do not disturb so no notification pops up mid-take.
- Close what you don’t show. Hide desktop icons and bookmarks with private names.
- Use a demo account with demo data, never your real inbox or customer data.
- Make the cursor larger: Settings → Accessibility → Mouse pointer and touch.
- Scale the app you show to 125–150 %, so text stays readable after export.
3. Record the sound well
Viewers forgive a soft picture; they leave over bad sound. Put the microphone close, a hand’s width from your mouth, in a room with soft surfaces. Record the microphone and system audio on separate tracks, so you can lower one without the other.
4. Record in sections
Record each step as its own take, or pause between steps. A mistake then costs one section, not the whole video. Leave a second of silence before and after you speak; it makes cuts clean.
5. Edit fast
Trim and cut first
Remove the start, the end and every mistake. Do this before anything else, so you don’t polish parts you will delete.
Limits: none.
Speed up the waiting
Installers, loading bars, long typing: speed those sections up 2–4× instead of cutting them out. The viewer sees that time passed.
Limits: speeding up sections with speech makes voices sound odd; cut those instead.
Zoom where the action is
See zoom on clicks for level, timing and easing.
Limits: by hand this is the slowest step.
6. Export
- YouTube: 1080p30 is enough for most tutorials. 4K helps if your screen is large and the text small – YouTube gives higher resolutions more bitrate.
- Shorts: 1080 × 1920. Crop to the part of the screen where the action is; a scaled-down widescreen video is unreadable.
- Use the graphics card’s encoder if you have one. It is much faster than software encoding.
Where Glidewright comes in
Record, adjust, export – in one program
Glidewright records the screen, a window or a region at 30 or 60 fps, with countdown, pause and a global shortcut. Microphone, system audio and webcam are separate tracks. The editor zooms on your clicks and typing automatically; you trim, cut and change the speed per section. Export presets: YouTube 4K60, tutorial 1080p30, Shorts/Reels 1080 × 1920 with a crop that follows the cursor.
Measured on a Ryzen 5 3600 with an RTX 3060 Ti: recording 3440 × 1440 at 60 fps with microphone and system audio dropped 0 frames at 1.4 % CPU; a 4K30 export took about 14 seconds per minute of video with the hardware encoder.
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