Chapter markers: mark the moment while you record, name it after

Nobody wants to scrub through eight minutes to find the part about deployment. Markers dropped while you talk turn one long recording into a set of chapters viewers can jump between.

By the VeoRec team · Oct 3, 2026 · 11 min read

Chapter markers are the difference between a recording people watch and a recording people mean to watch. A seven minute walkthrough with no structure asks the viewer to commit seven minutes. The same walkthrough with five named chapters lets the designer jump to "Empty states", the developer to "API changes" and the manager to "What ships Friday", each in one click.

The trick is to mark chapters while you record, at the moment the topic changes, because that is when you know where the boundaries are. Trying to find them afterwards means rewatching your own video, and nobody does that twice. In VeoRec the split is simple: you press a key during the take, you type names when you stop, and viewers get ticks on the progress bar and a list under the video. On Pro, AI chapters join in without touching the ones you placed.

Decide when a recording needs chapters

Not every video needs them. A 40 second bug reproduction is one chapter long. As a rule of thumb, add markers when a recording runs past two or three minutes, or when it covers things different people care about. Typical cases:

• Pull request walkthroughs: context, the main change, the risky part, tests. Reviewers jump to the risky part first. More in explaining a pull request with video.
• Onboarding recordings: setup, architecture, deploys, where to ask for help. New hires come back to one section weeks later (onboarding new engineers covers what to record).
• Design walkthroughs: one chapter per screen or flow, so stakeholders review the part they own.
• Weekly updates: done, in progress, blocked. The manager reads the blocked chapter first, always.
• Client deliverables: one chapter per page or feature, which also makes their feedback easier to place.

If a recording needs more than eight or ten chapters, it may be two recordings. How long a work video should be has a breakdown by purpose.

Drop a marker while you record

When you record from a normal web page, the extension puts a toolbar on the page. One of its buttons, a bookmark icon, is Add chapter marker, and its shortcut is plain M. Press it the moment you start a new topic. A short message on the page confirms the marker with its time and how many you have in this recording.

A few details that make markers easy to trust:

• The time comes from the recording's own clock, which excludes paused time. A marker lands where the viewer will see it, even if you paused twice before pressing M.
• A double press is one marker. Two presses within a second count once, so a nervous double tap does not create an empty chapter.
• M is ignored while you type. If you are filling in a form or writing in a text field on camera, the letter goes into the field and no marker is added.
• Markers survive a crash. They are saved with the take as you press them, so a recording recovered after a browser crash keeps its markers.

Mark chapters from any app with the global shortcut

Plain M only works on the page with the toolbar. When your recording moves into a code editor, a terminal or a design app, those keystrokes go to that app. For that case the extension has a Chrome shortcut, Alt+Shift+K, which adds a marker from anywhere in Chrome. Set to Global, it works from any application on your computer.

1. Open Chrome's shortcuts page Go to chrome://extensions/shortcuts. The extension's popup also has a "change" link next to the shortcut it shows, which opens the same page.
2. Find the marker command It is listed as "Add a chapter marker while recording". The default key is Alt+Shift+K; you can change it if that clashes with your editor.
3. Set its scope to Global Next to the shortcut, change "In Chrome" to "Global". Now the shortcut reaches the extension even when your editor or terminal is in front.
4. Test it once Start a short recording of your whole screen, switch to another app, press the shortcut twice a few seconds apart, and stop. The finish screen should list two markers.

Pick a key combination your other tools do not use. Some editors already bind Alt+Shift combinations to their own commands, and when two tools want the same keys, one of them misses the keypress. If K clashes, choose another letter on the same page; whatever you pick is what the extension listens for.

A cross-app take, marker by marker

Say you are recording a six minute handover of a data import job, sharing the entire screen. You start in the admin page in Chrome and press M at 0:00 for "What the import does". At 1:10 you switch to your editor; plain M would now type a letter into the file, so you press Alt+Shift+K instead for "The parser and its two quirks". At 3:05 you open the terminal and press it again for "Running it against staging". At 4:40 you are back on the admin page, where the toolbar lives, and plain M works again for "Checking the output". Four markers, two keys, no rewatching.

The mistake to avoid in that take is pressing M while the editor is focused. It does not add a marker; it types an "m" into your code, on camera, and you spend the next ten seconds deleting it while explaining what happened. Rehearse the switch once before you record, so your hand reaches for the global shortcut by itself whenever Chrome is not in front.

This is the setup to use for recording an IDE walkthrough or anything that crosses several apps. The IDE and terminal recording guide covers the rest of that setup, from font size to hiding secrets.

Name your chapters on the finish screen

When you stop, the finish screen opens with "Your recording is ready". If you added markers, it shows a section called Name your chapters: one row per marker, with its time on the left and a field on the right, filled with a placeholder such as "Chapter 1".

1. Type a name in each field Use what the viewer will find there. Press Enter or click into the next field; each name is saved as you leave its field, and the screen confirms "Chapter names saved."
2. Skip the ones you do not need Naming is optional. An unnamed marker still shows as a chapter, labelled "Marker", which is better than nothing but much less useful.
3. Name the recording too The Name field at the top sets the video's title. Leave it blank for an automatic title written from what you said.
4. Press Done The screen closes. The link has been on your clipboard since the upload finished.

The times next to each field help more than you might expect. If you said the chapter name aloud as you pressed M, glance at the time, remember the sentence and type it. If you did not, the time still tells you roughly where you were: two minutes in was probably the demo, five minutes in the code.

Name them right away. Thirty seconds after you stop, you remember exactly what each part was about; tomorrow you will need to watch it again to find out.

Write chapter names people actually click

A chapter list is a table of contents. Viewers scan it to decide what to watch, so a name should describe what they will learn or see in that part, in their words. Compare the two lists below for the same recording.

• Lead with the noun people search for: "Pricing page", "Webhook handler", "Empty states".
• Keep names to a few words so the list scans in a glance; detail belongs in the recording.
• Use the same words you said out loud at that point; the transcript then backs up the chapter.
• Flag the part that needs action: "Decision needed: refund policy" gets watched first.

See how viewers jump between chapters

On the watch page, chapters appear in two places. On the player's progress bar, each chapter is a small tick; hovering it shows the chapter's name and clicking it jumps to the start of that chapter. Under the video, a Chapters section lists every chapter with its time; click any row to jump there and play.

The same chapters travel with the video when you embed it in a wiki or help page with the embed code, so readers there get the ticks on the progress bar too. A long recording embedded in a document becomes navigable without anyone writing a list of timestamps underneath it.

Chapters you marked while recording carry a small "marked" label in that list, so viewers can tell a human-placed chapter from an automatic one. Try the list below: it behaves the way a viewer's chapter list does.

Chapters also work with the rest of the watch page. A comment left in the "Faster search results" chapter is tied to its second, a transcript search lands inside a chapter, and a link with ?t= and a number of seconds can start a viewer at the beginning of any chapter you choose.

This makes chapters a sharing tool as well as a viewing one. When a colleague asks "how do we deploy?", you do not need to send the whole onboarding video and say "skip to around five minutes". Note the time of the Deploys chapter in the list and send the link with ?t= and that number of seconds, and they start exactly there.

Recover from markers that went wrong

Live marking is imperfect, and that is fine. The common slips and what to do about each:

• You forgot to press M for a section. On Pro, AI chapters will usually fill the gap, since they are generated from the transcript. On the free plan, the chapter is simply not there; mention the start time of that part in the Summary under the video so readers can still find it.
• You pressed M a few seconds late. Viewers land just after the topic starts, which is mildly annoying but rarely confusing. Next time, press M as you begin the sentence that introduces the topic, not after it.
• You pressed M by accident. The toolbar has no undo for a single marker. On the finish screen, give that chapter a name that still makes sense for where it falls, rather than leaving a stray "Marker" in the list.
• You marked too many. A list of fifteen chapters in a six minute video stops being a table of contents. Name only the major ones carefully, and next time mark only topic changes, not every click.

Most of these problems disappear with an outline. When you know the five sections before you start, you press M five times, at the right moments, and the naming takes thirty seconds.

Combine your markers with AI chapters on Pro

On Pro, AI chapters are generated from the transcript after each recording, and the Edit tab on the watch page has Generate chapters (or Regenerate chapters) to run it again. That raises an obvious question: what happens to the markers you placed by hand?

They are kept apart. Your markers and the AI chapters are stored separately, and regenerating the AI chapters replaces only the AI ones; a machine's guess never overwrites a person's marker. For viewers, the two are merged into one list:

In practice, a good combination is to mark the big turns yourself and let the AI fill in the smaller sections in between. Your timing is exact, because you pressed the key when you meant it, and unnamed markers get a sensible title for free when an AI chapter lands on the same moment.

Plan your chapters before you press record

The fastest way to get clean chapters is a five line outline on a sticky note before you start. Each line is a chapter. While recording, you press M as you reach each line, say its name, and talk. On the finish screen you type the same five names. The whole thing adds about a minute and makes the recording much easier to watch.

For a four minute pull request walkthrough, the sticky note might read as follows. Each line becomes a marker, and the bold words become the chapter name:

1. Why invoices were sent twice. The bug in one sentence, and the customer report that surfaced it.
2. Reproducing it. The two clicks that trigger it, with Highlight clicks on so reviewers see them.
3. The fix in the webhook handler. The ten lines that matter, scrolled slowly, with the reasoning out loud.
4. How the tests cover it. The new test, run once, passing.
5. What I am unsure about. The edge case you want a second opinion on. Reviewers jump here first.

An outline also keeps the recording short, because it stops you wandering. If a topic is not on the list, it probably belongs in another video. How to script a screen recording shows a bullet outline format that keeps you sounding natural.

Chapters are most valuable in the recordings you expect people to revisit: onboarding, handovers, how-tos. Those are also the ones worth naming carefully, because the chapter list is what someone scans three months later when they half remember that VeoRec video where you explained the deploy. For developers recording walkthroughs regularly, the page on a screen recorder for developers shows how chapters fit with code review and handoffs.