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Screen Recording

Record and play back the screen recordings of employees' screens

K
Written by Katarina Dakic
Updated over 3 months ago

Screen Recording captures and plays back an employee's computer screen activities keeping a visual record of their workflow. The feature offers invaluable insights, helping you analyze how tasks are performed, spot any bottlenecks, and make sure work is done efficiently. It’s a great tool for understanding and improving your team’s workflow.

Permissions for this feature are granted to Admins, Managers, and clients who have access to it. The feature is available as an Add-On across all plans, making it easy to scale and customize according to your organization’s needs.

Accessing the Screen Recording

To access and view your screen recordings, navigate to the side menu and click on Screen Recording.

Screen recordings are also visible under individual employee pages and individual project pages.

When you click the See All button, you are automatically redirected to the Video Session page, where you will see all screen recordings for a specific employee or project.

Multiple Screen Recording

The Multiple Screen Recording feature enhances the user experience by enabling simultaneous playback and control of up to four recorded screens. This functionality allows users to easily monitor and interact with multiple recordings, making it ideal for situations that involve tracking and analyzing different activities happening concurrently on separate screens.

Key Capabilities:

  • Simultaneous Screen Playback: Users can view multiple screens playing in equal size by default. This provides a comprehensive overview of all recorded screens at once.

  • Focus Mode: With Focus Mode, users can enlarge one specific screen for a detailed view while still watching the others in smaller sizes. Users can easily switch between screens by clicking on the desired screen and adjust focus accordingly.

  • Full-Screen Mode: Focus Mode can also be enabled in full-screen view, allowing users to collapse smaller screens for a full, immersive experience on one screen. Switching between screens remains seamless in both regular and full-screen views.

  • Audio Sync and Playback: For sessions with audio integration, the audio sync feature ensures that all screens stay synchronized with the recording. Audio playback continues uninterrupted even when switching between screens.

  • Screen Deletion: Users can delete individual or all screen recordings via the 3-dot menu. Confirmation is required when deleting individual recordings, and successful actions are followed by a notification.

  • Dynamic UI for Smaller Monitors: The player dynamically adjusts in size to accommodate smaller monitors, avoiding the need for scroll bars and enhancing the viewing experience.

With this feature, users can optimize how they monitor, interact with, and analyze multiple screen recordings, providing a versatile and efficient solution for various use cases.

How to Enable Screen Recording

If you do not see any screen recordings on your Screen Recording page, it could be because video sessions are disabled by default. To set up your preferred video settings, navigate to SettingsTracking SettingsRecord Screen Recordings.

The Screen Recording starts recording the employee screen based on the tracking scenario you use. For example, if you use manual clock-in, the video session player starts recording the screen from the moment employees clock in, to the moment they clock out.

If you want to adjust screen recording on an individual employee level, you can override the settings for each employee and exclude certain employees from screen recording if needed.

Screen Recording while on Task

If you select Record while on task, screen recording will only commence when an employee is working on projects/tasks and logs in tasks via the Insightful Time Tracking widget. By clicking on the start of the project/task on the widget, the time measurement and screen recording begin simultaneously. This feature is applicable across all tracking scenarios, not solely project-based ones.

Permissions

If you are an Admin and want to grant your managers permission to view or delete screen recordings, you can do so by navigating to Settings → User Management → Managers tab → selecting the managers you want to authorize and assigning them the appropriate privileges.

If you also want to grant these permissions to your clients, navigate to Settings → User Management → Clients tab, select the clients you wish to authorize, and assign them the appropriate privileges.

Navigating the Screen Recording page

You can see all your screen recordings on the Screen Recording page. Screen recordings are split into one-hour intervals.

Each recorded video on your Screen Recording page is currently one hour long. Once a recorded session reaches the one-hour limit, another session starts recording screens instantly.

Screen Recording also records idle time. Recording stops only when the PC goes to sleep, the employee shuts down the laptop, or the employee clocks out, as per the tracking scenario.

To quickly find the item you want to view and analyze, you can filter screen recordings by the desired date range, as well as by:

  • Employee

  • Team

  • Computer ID

  • Project

  • Task

You can delete recorded video sessions individually, and you have the option to delete screen recordings in bulk.

You can access and review any recordings from the last 2 months.

Disclaimer

  • To avoid interruptions during video recording, make sure there is sufficient available disk space on your device at all times.

  • The actual resource usage may vary based on several factors, including:

    • The number of monitors used;

    • The resolution of the monitors;

    • The type of content being played on the monitors.

Navigating the Screen Recording

Upon opening a recorded video session for a specific employee, you are able to:

  • Play and pause

  • Move and jump to different points in the video

  • Choose playback speed – by default, it is set to 1 (Normal playback speed), but you can choose between 0.5, Normal (1), 1.5, or 2x.

If an employee uses multiple screens, Screen Recording will record them all. When an employee is working on two or more screens, each screen is recorded separately, even if they are being used simultaneously. On the Screen Recording page, you will find recordings of multiple screens grouped under one card:

Once you open a card with multiple Screen Recordings, click on the specific video you want to play, and the recording should start right away.

Screen Recording Resource Usage

Here is the information you need to understand the resource usage of video recording that can help you optimize your system's performance:

  • When recording a 1-hour video, you can expect the following average file size of approximately 1.5 GB

  • CPU Usage - Around 6%

  • RAM Consumption: Approximately 525MB

These values represent the average usage of resources for screen recording.

Enabling Screen Recording

On macOS Catalina and Ventura, Insightful may sometimes require the user to grant permission for screen recording. Without granting permission, screen recording of the employee's screen won’t show up on the dashboards.

To enable screenshots in this case, the user will have to:

  1. Select System Preferences from the Apple menu on your Mac.

  2. Click the icon labeled Security & Privacy.

  3. Click the Privacy tab at the top.

  4. Click on Screen Recording in the left-hand column to manage app permissions.

  5. Check the box next to the Insightful icon on the right side to enable taking screenshots.

Mac OS Ventura 13.6.4 and newer versions

For Mac OS Ventura 13.6.4 and newer versions settings are a bit different.

If the app isn’t already listed in the Screen Recording section, the request for taking the screen recording from the agent might not have been sent. In that case, the user should do the following:

  1. Navigate to System Preferences from the Apple menu.

  2. Open Privacy&Security.

  3. Search for Screen & System Audio Recording.

  4. Press +.

  5. Locate the Insightful installation folder.

  6. Add the Insightful.app manually, as the company version might not be listed in that Application list.

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