How to Fix Eye Contact in ScreenFlow

Why there's no live fix on a Mac

On Windows, eye contact can be corrected while you record: NVIDIA Broadcast on PCs with an RTX graphics card, or Windows Studio Effects on PCs with a compatible NPU. Neither exists on macOS, and at the time of writing macOS's own camera effects — Portrait, Studio Light, Center Stage and backgrounds — don't include eye contact correction. FaceTime's Eye Contact setting is for FaceTime calls on iPhone, not for recordings on a Mac.

That leaves two things you control on a Mac: how close to the lens your notes sit while you record, and correcting the webcam footage afterwards. The rest of this guide covers both.

Why ScreenFlow makes correction easier

ScreenFlow records your webcam as a separate clip from your screen recording, and clips can sit on their own tracks. That matters for two reasons. First, you only correct the footage with your face in it — not the screen demo, which has no eyes to correct and makes up most of a typical lesson. Second, you can correct the camera at its full resolution, rather than as a small picture-in-picture bubble that gives the correction too few pixels around your eyes.

Workflow 1: correct the webcam clip before you edit

The cleanest routine is to fix the camera straight after recording, before you make any cuts, so nothing needs re-syncing later:

• Copy the webcam clip from your recording into a new ScreenFlow document whose canvas matches your webcam's resolution — 1920×1080 or 1280×720 for most cameras — and scale it to fill the canvas.
• Export it as an MP4 at 1080p or smaller, with the microphone audio included so you can check lip sync later.
• Upload it to a correction tool such as GazeFix and download the corrected MP4.
• Back in your lesson, select the webcam clip and use Replace Media to point it at the corrected file. Telestream's documentation says Replace Media keeps all the settings from the old media, so your picture-in-picture size, position, crop and actions carry over.
• Play the last few seconds to confirm your lips still match your audio, then edit as normal.

Already edited? Swap or overlay the camera

If you've already cut the lesson, Replace Media is still the first thing to try, because the corrected file keeps the original clip's duration and lines up from its first frame. Correct the whole camera clip exactly as above, then replace it.

If Replace Media in your version swaps the whole recording rather than only the camera, use an overlay instead: place the corrected camera file on a track above the original camera clip, starting at the same frame, match its scale and position, and turn off the original. Because the corrected file covers the camera's full length, every cut you made to the original still lines up underneath.

Only correct where your face is large

Most ScreenFlow lessons show the webcam full-screen for the introduction and wrap-up, and as a small corner bubble during the demo. Drift is obvious at full size and barely noticeable in the bubble, especially when the viewer is watching your cursor.

So for many lessons, correct only the full-screen camera sections. Set In and Out points around each one with I and O, use Export Selected Range, correct the file, and lay it over the original. Every upload costs at least one credit and is rounded up to the next minute, so put several lessons' intros back to back in one document and export them together: ten 20-second intros cost ten credits uploaded one by one, but four as a single 200-second file.

Export settings that keep the correction clean

• MP4 (H.264) at your webcam's native resolution, 1080p or smaller — larger files come back at 1080p anyway.
• Include the microphone audio in the export.
• Keep each file under 500 MB, the upload limit. Webcam footage compresses well; at around 5 Mbps, roughly 13 minutes fits in 500 MB. Split longer recordings.
• Keep your face reasonably large in the webcam frame, and light it from the front — a bright window behind your monitor leaves your eyes in shadow.
• Angle lights so they don't reflect in glasses; glare sits exactly where the correction needs to see your pupils.

Sync, frame rate and resolution

Webcam footage is often recorded at a slightly variable frame rate. GazeFix converts variable-frame-rate video to a constant rate, at most 60fps, while keeping the clip's duration, so the corrected camera should stay in sync with your screen and audio. Check the end of long recordings anyway, since that's where any drift shows first.

Output is watermark-free at up to 1080p, which is the native resolution of most webcams. If you record with a 4K camera, the corrected file comes back at 1080p — still more than a picture-in-picture bubble ever needs.

What it costs for a course

GazeFix charges one credit per minute of video, rounded up per upload, and credits never expire. A 30-lesson course with two minutes of full-screen camera per lesson is 60 credits — exactly the Creator pack at $34, about $0.57 a minute. Correcting every second of webcam footage instead, at eight minutes a lesson, is 240 credits, which the Pro and Creator packs cover together for $113. Re-recording a few lessons next year costs only those minutes, with no subscription to restart.

If you already pay for Descript or another editor with eye contact built in, and you'd happily edit there, its correction may cost you nothing extra. The reason to correct separately is to keep editing in ScreenFlow.

Record so there's less to fix

Correction works best on small angles and short glances, so get your notes close to the lens first. Put them in a narrow window directly under your Mac's camera rather than on a second display, sit a little further back than feels natural, and look into the lens for your opening line, your main points and your sign-off. Our guide to reading a script on camera covers the setup in more detail.

Then test on a lesson you know is bad. GazeFix gives you one free credit when you sign up, with no card required — enough to correct a full minute. Export one minute of full-screen webcam from your worst intro, correct it, and swap it in.