Rutba Office 1.45: a screen recorder in Video, and layers and photo tools in Image

1.43 turned Video into an editor. The next two releases gave it something to edit. 1.44.0 was tagged on 12 October but went out without installers, because a new file type had no icon and that stopped the build, so 1.45.0 on 13 October is the first installer carrying both. This post covers the two together.

Record your screen, with your camera in the corner

Record Screen sits on Video’s Home and Insert tabs and on the launcher’s start screen. It records a whole screen, one window, or a region you draw, and the region is kept as a crop you can change later. The camera records at the same time as a second file on the same clock, shown in a corner as a circle or a rounded or square rectangle in one of three sizes, mirrored if you like and dragged to its corner before you start. The microphone and the computer’s own sound each have a level meter that moves before you start, so you know they are working.

• Quality: 15, 30 or 60 frames a second, up to 720, 1080 or 1440 lines. The defaults keep a 1080p screen at 30 frames a second near 6 Mbps.
• While recording: a countdown, a Pause that holds everything at once, and Ctrl+Shift+F10 to stop or Ctrl+Shift+F9 to pause from any program, or from the tray icon.
• Safe to disk: the recording is written a few megabytes at a time into a Rutba Recordings folder in Videos. The box says how long the disk has room for and warns when five minutes are left, and if the suite stops mid-recording, the launcher’s Recover brings it back at full length.
• On Stop the screen lands on the main track and the camera on the track above as a picture in picture you can move, resize, reshape or remove, with each sound on a track of its own.

Presentations’ Screen Recording now opens the same recorder without the camera, and still puts the recording on the slide. 1.44 also fixed two faults from 1.43: a playing video flickered and its sound kept starting over, and an export began with a moment of black under its titles.

Introduction videos, scene by scene

Introduction video, from the launcher or from Video, opens a project of scenes: a title card, you on camera, your screen with the camera in a corner, and an end card, with side by side as a fifth layout. Scenes can be moved, added and taken out, and a recorded scene’s layout can still be changed afterwards, because the screen and the camera are kept separate.

• A teleprompter: write a scene’s script and it scrolls above the camera while you record, at the speed you choose. Every take is kept, so an earlier one can be put back.
• A brand kit keeps your name and role, a logo, three colours and a font. It draws the cards in your colours and puts your name in a lower third over the first recorded scene, right to left for an Urdu or Arabic name.
• The pointer: clicks in the suite’s own windows are recorded as a layer that draws a highlight and a ring at each click, and Zoom on Clicks follows them in and out. Either can be turned off afterwards.
• Captions: import a SubRip (.srt) or WebVTT (.vtt) file onto a track of its own, edit each line like a title, and export it again.
• Export for where it is going: YouTube at 1080p, LinkedIn and X at 16:9 or square, Reels, Shorts and TikTok at 9:16, or a small MP4 for email, each showing its frame size and likely file size. An upright export lays every scene out for that shape and leaves the project as it was.

Image: layers, then a photo editor’s tools

A picture still opens for quick edits as before. Since 1.44, Insert puts text, WordArt, shapes, icons, charts, another picture or an adjustment on a layer of its own, and the picture you opened becomes the Background layer. The Layers panel reorders, hides, locks, renames and groups them, and each layer has an opacity and one of sixteen blend modes. Adjustment layers change everything under them and nothing above. A layered picture saves as a .rimg project that opens again exactly as it was, and Export flattens it to PNG, JPEG or WebP.

1.45 added the tools of a photo editor, fourteen of them in a column down the left of the picture (on the right in Urdu and Arabic):

• Selections by rectangle, ellipse, lasso, magic wand or colour, which can be added to, taken from or intersected, then feathered, grown or shrunk. With a selection, adjustments and filters change only what is selected.
• Painting: a brush on a paint layer of its own, an eraser, and a fill and gradient that stay inside the selection.
• Retouching: a clone stamp that copies from where you Alt+click, and a healing brush that covers a blemish with clean skin matched to the colour around it.
• Masks that reveal or hide a layer, made from the selection or painted, then feathered, inverted, applied or deleted.
• Free Transform to scale, skew, distort or add perspective by the corners, and Perspective, which takes four pins on something photographed at an angle and straightens it.

Edit a document’s picture in Image

In Documents, Worksheets and Presentations, select a picture and choose Picture Format → Edit in Image. Crop it, correct it, draw on it or add layers, press Save and return, and the edited picture goes back where it was. Undo in the document brings the old one back. Worksheets and Presentations gain a Picture Format tab for it.

Passwords that no longer hold up the other windows

Protecting a sheet or a workbook, restricting a document’s editing, or opening or saving a password-protected file all hash the password 100,000 times or more, as Office does. Since 1.45 that work runs on threads of its own, so every other open document keeps taking your typing while it runs, and the window that asked shows “Checking…” on its button. The files written are the same as before, byte for byte, and the hashing is a third faster.

As with every release, both were put through the fuzzer that damages 5,400 files, the old Office formats among them, and none faulted. The window checks run the whole introduction flow from the launcher, with a stand-in camera, an Urdu name in the brand kit and exports read back for their size, length and tracks.