App demos
Show your app the way the store would
Record the app on your own machine and let Prequel do the part that usually needs an editor — the pushes, the framing, the background, the cuts.
Apple Silicon · macOS 14+ · one email when the first build is ready
An app demo is judged against the videos on the store listing next to yours, and those were made by people with a motion designer. That is an unfair comparison and it is the one you get.
What actually separates the two is not budget. It is that a produced video changes distance — it pushes in on the moment that matters and pulls back when it does not — and a screen recording never does.
Record the app, not the screenshot
Pick a display, a window or a dragged region and start. A window capture is usually right here — it keeps the rest of the desktop out of frame without you having to tidy it first, and a dragged region works when the interesting part is a panel rather than the whole app.
While it captures, Prequel is noting where you click and type. When you stop, the editor opens on the take with those moments already turned into zooms, the camera framed, and a background applied behind the recording.
Shape it for wherever it is going
Store listings and social posts want different frames, and a landscape recording that gets cropped to vertical usually loses half of what it was showing.
Prequel stores every geometry setting as a fraction of the frame's shorter edge rather than in pixels. Switch a take from 16:9 to 9:16 and the camera stays a quarter of the way across the frame instead of sliding off it, the padding stays proportional, and the look survives the change. Presets cover 16:9, 4K, vertical 9:16, square, 4:5 and the named social sizes.
What it costs you
One recording and a few minutes of disagreeing with the automatic pass. Everything happens on your Mac — capture, editing and export all run on its own media engine, so there is no upload, no queue and no cloud render between you and the file.
Automatic
It arrives already directed
A raw screen recording is flat — one distance from the viewer for the whole take, with the thing that matters too small to see. Prequel watches where you click and type while it records, and opens the editor with that pass already made.
- Zooms placedOn every click and every burst of typing
- Camera framedShaped, sized and set in a corner
- Background appliedPadding, radius, border and shadow
- Audio balancedMicrophone and system on separate gains
- Cursor cleaned upSmoothed, resized, hidden when it idles
The editor
Everything you would have done in post
It opens by itself when you stop recording, on the take you just made. Nothing to import, nothing to line up.
Zooms that follow the work
Push in on the cursor, a region or whatever you are typing into. Level, speed, tilt and yaw, with progressive blur falling away from the focus.
A camera you frame afterwards
Circle, squircle, rounded or wide, in any corner and any size. The webcam is never burned into the recording, so none of it is decided while you record.
Backgrounds worth shipping
Your own wallpaper by default, seven bundled presets, gradients and solids. Padding, radius, border and shadow on top.
Cuts on a real timeline
Trim the dead air, slice by slice, with a waveform under every clip and a playhead that scrubs. Layout, background and audio can all change mid-take.
A cursor that behaves
Four pointer styles, resized to survive a zoom, and gone from the frame after a few seconds of stillness rather than parked over your work.
What you see is what exports
The preview and the exporter draw the same plan, so the file is the frame you approved — not a close approximation of it.
Quality
Exports that hold up
A video that looks produced is worth nothing if the file is soft. Capture and export run on your Mac's own media engine — hardware H.264 or HEVC, composited in Metal — so 1080p60 records without dropping frames and 4K is a setting rather than a compromise.
- Resolution
- Up to 4K
- Frame rate
- Up to 120 fps
- Codecs
- H.264 · HEVC
- Encoding
- Hardware, VideoToolbox
- Compositing
- Metal
- Output
- Constant frame rate MP4
Formats
One MP4, shaped for wherever it is going
Switch a recording from landscape to vertical and the look holds — the framing is stored in proportions, not pixels, so nothing slides off the frame on the way.
- Landscape 16:9
- 4K
- Vertical 9:16
- Square 1:1
- Portrait 4:5
- YouTube
- Shorts
- TikTok
- Reels
- X
Be there for the first build
Prequel is in development. Leave an address and we will send it the day it is worth installing.
Curious about the internals? Read the blog
FAQ
Zooms, exports and the rest
Can I record an iPhone app with Prequel?
Not directly. Prequel captures a display, a window or a region of your Mac, so the app has to be on screen already — mirroring the device to your Mac and capturing that window works, and everything after the capture is identical.
Can I record just the app window instead of the whole screen?
Yes. A window is one of the three things you can point Prequel at, alongside a whole display and a region you drag. Recording the window keeps the rest of your desktop — and whatever is in your menu bar — out of the take entirely, which is usually easier than cropping it back out.
Can I get a vertical version for the store listing?
Yes, from the same take. Framing is stored as proportions of the frame's shorter edge rather than in pixels, so switching a recording from 16:9 to 9:16 keeps the camera and the padding where you put them instead of sliding them off the edge.
How do I show a feature that takes a lot of clicks?
Record it at the pace you would actually use it and let the cuts do the compression. Every click becomes a zoom, so the viewer is pushed in on the thing being pressed rather than watching a pointer cross an unchanged screen, and the stretches in between are the first thing to trim.
Will the app's interface be sharp in the export?
Capture is at your display's native resolution, so a Retina Mac has real detail to push into rather than an upscale. Export runs at up to 4K through your Mac's own media engine in H.264 or HEVC, at a constant frame rate.
What do I need to record an app demo on macOS?
An Apple Silicon Mac running macOS 14 or later, and the Screen Recording permission granted in System Settings. Nothing else is installed and nothing runs in the background between recordings.
Is the recording processed in the cloud?
No. Capture, editing and export all run locally on your Mac. An unreleased app being demonstrated a fortnight before launch stays on the machine that recorded it.