RecordingAudio and camera17 September 2026·5 min read

Before you press record: a screen recording checklist

Nine things to check in the minute before a screen recording, so the take you get is the one you send. Notifications, the desktop, the window, the audio, the camera and the grants.

Musthaq Ahamad

Building Prequel

Most screen recordings that get thrown away were not ruined by the recording. They were ruined in the minute before it: a notification across the demo, a tab full of somebody's name, a microphone that was never on. This is the list of what to check in that minute. It takes less time to read than one bad take takes to redo.

1. Silence the Mac

Turn on a Focus. Do Not Disturb from Control Centre stops every banner; a custom Focus can let one or two apps through if you are waiting on something. Quit Slack, Messages and Mail, since none of them can be trusted to be quiet, and mute the browser tab that is playing something in the background. A notification in a recording cannot be cropped out, and it is the one thing every viewer will read.

2. Clean the desktop

If any of the desktop will be in shot, it will be looked at. Move the files into a folder, or switch to a spare desktop with nothing on it. Pick a plain wallpaper. If the dock will be in shot, hide it: it is a row of app icons that says nothing about your product, and a menu bar of status icons is the same. Recording a single window avoids all of this in one go.

3. Set the window

Decide what fills the frame. A window at 1400 or so pixels wide fills a 16:9 frame well and keeps the text large; a browser stretched across a 34-inch display does not. Close the tabs that are not part of the demo, and clear the address bar of anything you would not paste into a public channel. Log out of the account with real customers in it and into the demo one.

4. Turn the microphone on, and check it

Pick the device, then say a sentence and watch the level. A recorder with a meter tells you it can hear you before a word is lost; one without makes you find out on playback. Headphones with a microphone beat the laptop's: the laptop's hears the keyboard, the fan and the room, and a viewer on headphones hears all three. Close the window if the street is loud.

If the Mac's own sound is part of the demo, check that system audio is being recorded. It is a separate switch in most recorders and off in some.

5. Decide about the camera

A face in the corner makes a recording easier to watch and harder to skim past, and it is a decision to make before the take, because a camera that was off cannot be added later. If it is on: light in front of you, not behind; the lens at eye level, so it is not looking up your nose; a glance at what is over your shoulder. The picture-in-picture entry has where in the frame to put it.

6. Check the grants

A recorder without the Screen Recording permission records the wallpaper. One without the Microphone permission records silence. The failure shows up on playback rather than at the start, so look before recording: a recorder that shows a warning when a grant is missing is worth having for this alone. Prequel's dock shows one for any permission the next recording would use.

7. Know the first ten seconds

You do not need a script. You need to know the first sentence and the first click, because a viewer decides in the opening seconds whether to keep watching, and a take that starts with "um, so, let me just find the" has lost them. Say what they are about to see, then show it.

8. Know the last ten seconds

And how it ends. A demo that trails off while you look for the stop button ends on a shot of you looking for the stop button. Decide on the last thing they see, do it, say one closing sentence, and stop. A keyboard shortcut for stopping means the pointer does not wander to the menu bar on the way out.

9. Do a five-second take

Record five seconds. Play it back. Is the text sharp, is the voice there, is the level right, is the camera framed? This is the one item on the list that finds the thing you did not think of, and it costs five seconds.

Then record

Everything above is about the take being the one you send. What happens after it stops is the other half, and that half is what Prequel is for: it opens the recording in an editor with the zooms placed on your clicks, the camera framed, a background behind the screen and the words transcribed for captions, so the first pass is done by the time you have read this sentence.