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Export screenshots, videos, and point clouds

Screenshot of a view in the Viewer

Right-click the title bar or tab of a view, or the view in the blueprint panel, and choose:

  • "Copy screenshot" to copy it to the clipboard, or
  • "Save screenshot…" to save it as a PNG file.

Copying screenshots is not supported in Safari.

Screenshots from Python

rerun.experimental.ViewerClient can take screenshots of a running Viewer. This API is experimental and may change.

from rerun.experimental import ViewerClient

client = ViewerClient.connect()

# Save a PNG file on the machine that runs the Viewer:
client.save_screenshot("viewer.png")

# Get a PNG as bytes, without writing a file:
png_bytes = client.take_screenshot(max_size=1024)

Both methods take an optional view_id to capture only one view. client.get_state().views lists the views and their IDs.

To take screenshots without a window, for example in CI, start a headless Viewer with ViewerClient.spawn(headless=True). This still needs a GPU or a software renderer.

Screenshots from the command line 

rerun recording.rrd --new --screenshot-to screenshot.png --window-size 1920x1080

The Viewer opens the file, saves a screenshot of the whole window, and quits. --new starts a new Viewer. Without it, if a Viewer is already running, the command only sends the recording to that Viewer and saves no screenshot.

Export videos and point clouds

The Viewer cannot export a video of the playback, or export point clouds or meshes to files such as PLY. See missing features.

Workarounds:

  • To make a video, take a screenshot per time step with ViewerClient.set_time and save_screenshot, and combine the images with a tool such as ffmpeg. You can also use a screen recorder.
  • To export data, read it back with the dataframe API and write the file yourself, for example a PLY file with trimesh or open3d.