When you take a region capture in hypershot, you don’t get one frame. You get a short timeline of your screen from just before you let go, so you can scrub back to the exact frame you meant to catch. Think of the tooltip at full opacity, the animation mid-motion, or the value before it changed.
The burst
While you drag out a region, hypershot records the screen into a rolling buffer, at up to 30 frames a second. When you let go, the last 1 s of it comes with your capture (set it anywhere up to 5 s in Settings → Captures → Capture window). The editor opens on the moment you released, and the timeline holds everything before it.
Only the frames that changed
Here’s where the space goes, or rather where it doesn’t. Thirty frames a second of a screen that isn’t moving is thirty copies of the same picture. So when the capture lands, hypershot walks the burst and compares each frame with the last one it kept, looking only inside your selection. A frame stays if something in it changed. If nothing did, it isn’t stored again.
That comparison is pickier than it sounds. Screens are noisy: video playback, compression and dithering mean two frames that look identical are almost never identical pixel for pixel. Comparing them exactly would keep every frame. Instead hypershot compares a downscaled copy of each with a small tolerance for that noise, tuned so the faintest real change still counts as a change. And a frame it can’t verify is always kept: it would rather store one image too many than lose the one you wanted.
So a still screen is a single frame. A tooltip fading in is a handful. A video playing in your selection is all of them. The burst on disk is exactly as big as what actually happened on your screen.
Frozen mode: the frame before you were there
The hardest moments to capture are the ones that vanish when you interact: a hover state, a menu, a tooltip. Frozen region capture is designed for exactly this: the capture engine freezes your screen when you hit spacebar, so the screenshot shows your screen exactly what you intended No cursor over your tooltip. No overlay in the corner of your evidence.
A file you can open on either OS
The frames, your annotations and your place on the timeline save together into a .hypercapture file: a zip, built on minizip, of WebP (or PNG) frames and CBOR metadata. It stays small for the same reason the burst does: only the frames that changed are in it. Reopen it next week and every frame is still there to pick from, with your annotations still editable.
It’s also the quiet part of the cross-platform story. Video containers are a cross-platform tax: codecs that differ per OS, files that play in one player and stutter in another. A zip of images and their metadata has none of that. Open the same .hypercapture on your Mac or your Windows machine and the timeline, the frames and the annotations are identical, because they’re all just data.
You already knew which moment you wanted. hypershot keeps every version of it, and none of the copies.