# Elgato Studio Elgato Studio is a free desktop app (Windows 11 and macOS 26 Tahoe or later) that brings Elgato's prompter, camera and capture tools together. Elgato's pitch is "one place to run your entire video setup". In practice, that means one app per desk instead of one app per gadget. Plug in a new piece of Elgato hardware and it shows up in the same window, so there's no new program to learn. Why should you care? If you record talking-head videos, courses or screencasts, the friction usually isn't the camera itself. It's the pile of small utilities around it: one to tweak the webcam, another for the teleprompter, yet another to grab footage from a capture card. Studio collapses those into three modules. ## Prompter The module I find the most interesting, because it works WITHOUT Elgato hardware: - A script editor to write, edit and organize scripts - Presentation controls for how the text looks and scrolls - Voice Sync: scrolling follows your voice, so you don't have to fiddle with a speed setting while talking - Virtual Prompter: turns a laptop or a monitor you already own into a teleprompter, free for everyone - An extra display mode to push anything to a second screen ## Camera Full control over Elgato's webcams (Facecam, Facecam 4K) and Cam Link 4K (which turns a real camera into a webcam): exposure, pan/tilt/zoom, dynamic range, white balance, noise reduction, ISO and shutter speed. Settings can be saved to the camera's flash memory, so they follow the device to another machine. You can also record directly in Studio, with a HUD for live metrics and a composition grid. ## Capture Connect a capture card and record clean gameplay footage. There's also a separate free iPad app (Elgato Capture) to record on an iPad or to use it as a gaming screen. ## Stream Deck integration A free Stream Deck plugin lets you scroll the script, adjust framing or start a recording with one button, even when Studio runs in the background. That's the part that makes the whole thing feel like one system rather than a bundle of apps. ## Where it fits Studio doesn't replace [[OBS Studio]] for scenes, overlays or streaming, nor [[Descript]] or [[Tella]] for editing. It sits one step earlier: getting the camera right and reading a script while looking at the lens. The free Virtual Prompter alone is a good reason to try it, even if you don't own any Elgato gear (i.e., a laptop and a script are enough). ## References - [Elgato Studio](https://www.elgato.com/eu/en/s/elgato-studio) ## Related - [[OBS Studio]] - [[Descript]] - [[Tella]]