How to pause a Local Lens walkthrough and keep one take

Select Pause during a Local Lens recording to leave waiting time out of the video, then Resume to continue the same take. Pausing keeps the screen shared and preserves the active-time count. Use Stop recording when finished, preview the result and select Download video before discarding or leaving the page.

Open Local Lens

Start with a clear point to pause

A short bug demonstration often has a useful action, a wait, and a result. Local Lens lets you pause during that wait and resume within the same recording. For example, show the button that starts a report, pause while the report prepares, then resume to show the completed screen. Tell the viewer that you skipped the wait so the transition remains understandable.

Select Start recording and choose the screen, window or tab in the browser prompt. Wait for the recording state and running timer before demonstrating the first action. Set Request shared audio beforehand if needed; the setting becomes unavailable once the session starts. Local Lens does not request your microphone, so plan a visual explanation if spoken narration is essential.

Pause the recording while keeping sharing active

Select Pause before the part you want to omit. The control changes to Resume, and the page reports that your screen is still shared. This pauses the recorder without ending the capture source. If your intention is to stop sharing your screen altogether, finish the recording instead.

Return the shared source to the next useful view before selecting Resume. For the report example, wait until its results are ready, then resume and demonstrate them. A paused interval is excluded from the video; it is not a section you can retrieve later. The app has no trimming tool to remove an action that you already recorded.

Read the timer as active recording time

The timer adds time only while the app is recording. Pause preserves the accumulated duration, and Resume starts adding to it again. As an illustration, a minute of recording, a two-minute pause and another minute of recording use about two active minutes. The pause does not restart the timer or grant a fresh five-minute allowance.

Each take still has a five-active-minute limit and a separate 100 MiB encoded-data limit. Pausing does not clear the video already collected or reset its size counter. Use the pause to skip an unhelpful wait, while keeping the actual demonstration short enough for both boundaries. The encoded-data limit is not a ceiling on total browser memory use.

Finish directly from Pause when the explanation is complete

You can select Stop recording while paused; you do not have to resume just to finish. Stop finalizes the current take and stops the capture tracks. Wait for the finished preview before trying to save. Ending sharing through the browser also asks the app to finalize the captured video, including when the recorder was paused.

If pausing is unavailable and the operation fails, the app attempts to stop the recording for saving and displays that message. Check whether a usable preview appears rather than assuming the pause succeeded. A recorder failure or a recording with no video data has a separate error path and does not establish that a usable take exists.

Review and download before preparing another take

Play the finished preview and check the transition around the pause. Select Download video to save the take explicitly. The file uses a supported native WebM or MP4 format; Local Lens does not convert it into a format you choose. Check that the file has saved before clearing the session.

Start recording remains disabled after completion. To make another take, first save anything you want to keep, then select Discard recording to return to the ready state. Discard removes the in-tab result. Closing or reloading also loses unsaved footage, and there is no recording history to restore it from. A paused session is still temporary tab memory, not a saved draft.

AI-assisted ForgeHub editorial. App capabilities were checked against its implementation; this guide is not an independent review.