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.
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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.
- Record your screen and cameraPick a display, a window or an area you drag out, with your camera, microphone and system audio each on their own track.
- Zooms and layout are applied automaticallyPrequel reads where you clicked and typed, then places the zooms, frames your camera and sets a background behind it.
- Edit, export and shareMove a zoom, trim a clip or fix a caption, then export one MP4 at up to 4K or send a link that plays anywhere.
Zoom and pan
Zooms that follow the action
Prequel automatically zooms in when you click or type, then softens the rest of the window so viewers know where to look. Every zoom is added to the timeline, so you can move, retime or delete it at any time.
Layouts
Switch layouts clip by clip
Choose from fourteen layouts for the same take: camera in the corner, beside the screen, split with it or hidden entirely. Use one layout for the whole video, or change it clip by clip.
Subtitles
Subtitles you can edit like text
Prequel transcribes every word on your Mac when the editor opens. Fix captions by typing in the transcript, choose a subtitle style or delete a sentence to remove it from the video.
Thisisthecheckoutweshippedlastweek
Thisisthecheckoutweshippedlastweek
Thisisthecheckoutweshippedlastweek
Thisisthecheckoutweshippedlastweek
Thisisthecheckoutweshippedlastweek
Thisisthecheckoutweshippedlastweek
Thanks so much for jumping on this call
Iwanttoshowyousomethingcool
[pause here]
we’ve been building for the past few months
Teleprompter
A teleprompter that follows your voice
Prequel hangs your script from the notch, just under the camera, and follows your voice — the word you're saying lights up as you say it. Wander off script and it waits for you; skip ahead or fall behind and it catches up within a couple of words.
Instant edit
Start with the edit already done
Prequel records where you click and type, then opens the editor with zooms already placed, a framed camera and a polished background. Spend less time building the first cut and more time fine-tuning.
- 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 by hand
It opens by itself when you stop recording, on the take you just made. Nothing to import, nothing to line up.
Guide attention automatically
Prequel zooms into the part of the screen that matters: the cursor, a region you draw, or whatever you are typing into. Set the level, the speed and how much the rest of the frame blurs.
Look present without taking over the video
Your camera stays framed and out of the way: circle, squircle, rounded, wide or portrait, in any corner and any size. It is never burned into the recording, so none of it is decided while you record.
Make recordings look designed
Add a background, padding and a shadow without editing any of it by hand. Your own wallpaper by default, seven bundled presets, gradients and solids.
Cut the parts nobody needs to see
Trim the pauses yourself, slice by slice, with a waveform under every clip. Layout, background and audio can all change mid-take.
Keep the pointer out of the way
Fifteen pointer styles, resized so the cursor survives a zoom. Smoothed while it travels, and hidden after a few seconds of stillness.
Export the frame you approved
The preview and the exporter draw the same plan, so the file matches what you signed off in the editor.
Quality
Videos stay sharp at 4K
Capture and export run on your Mac's own media engine. 1080p at 60 fps records without dropping frames, and 4K is a setting you pick.
- 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
Export in any frame
Turn one recording into different formats without manually reframing every element. Switch from landscape to vertical and the layout stays intact.
- Landscape 16:9
- 4K
- Vertical 9:16
- Square 1:1
- Portrait 4:5
- YouTube
- Shorts
- TikTok
- Reels
- X
Record demos worth sharing
Free for 7 days. No watermark on anything you export.
No credit card required
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.