Product demos
Record a product demo that looks produced
Walk through the product once. Prequel pushes in on every click, frames your camera, drops the dead air and exports one MP4 at up to 4K.
Apple Silicon · macOS 14+ · one email when the first build is ready
A product demo has a specific problem. The thing you are demonstrating is usually small — a button, a field, a number that changes — and a raw screen recording shows it at the same distance for the whole take. The viewer is looking at a whole desktop while you talk about a corner of it.
The usual fix is an hour in an editor per minute of video, placing zooms by hand and guessing where the interesting moment was. Most demos never get that hour, which is why most demos look like a screen recording.
The zooms are already placed
Prequel records where you click and where you type while it captures. By the time the editor opens on your take, those moments have been clustered into zooms — pushed in on what you were doing, pulled back out when you moved on. You are not looking at raw footage waiting for work. You are looking at something close to the finished video, deciding whether you agree with it.
Every one of those zooms is an ordinary slice on the timeline. Move it, retime it, point it somewhere else, delete it. Nothing about the automatic pass is baked in.
Aim them at what matters
A demo usually needs two kinds of push. A cursor zoom follows the pointer around the screen, which suits a walkthrough where you are moving between parts of the interface. A region zoom holds still on an area you draw, which is what a pricing table or a settings panel needs — a zoom that drifts about while someone is reading is worse than no zoom at all.
Level, speed, tilt and yaw are set per zoom, and blur falls away progressively from the focus, so a push reads as depth rather than a jump cut.
The rest of it
The camera is captured as its own track rather than burned into the screen, so whether it appears, what shape it is and where it sits are all still open when the recording stops. Microphone and system audio are separate too, with separate gains. Export is one MP4 at up to 4K, rendered on your Mac's own media engine, with nothing uploaded anywhere to make it.
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
How long does a product demo take to make?
About as long as the demo runs, plus the time you spend changing your mind. The editor opens on the take with the zooms already placed, the camera framed and a background applied, so the first thing you see is close to the finished video rather than raw footage waiting for an hour of work.
How long should a product demo video be?
Two to three minutes for a demo someone chose to watch, under ninety seconds for one embedded on a landing page. Cutting to length is a scrub and a blade rather than a re-record, so the honest answer is to record the whole walkthrough and decide afterwards where it stops earning attention.
Can I fix one step without recording the whole demo again?
Yes. The take is a timeline, so trim the part that went wrong and record a replacement. Layout, background and audio can all change mid-take, which means a re-recorded step does not have to match the framing of the one it replaces.
Will the small text in my product be readable?
That is what the zooms are for. Capture runs at your display's native resolution, so a Retina Mac exporting at 1080p has roughly three times the pixels it needs and a 2x push still lands on real detail. Region zooms hold still, which is what you want over a form or a settings panel.
Do I need to know how to edit video?
No, and that is the point of the automatic first pass. What usually needs an editor — deciding where to push in, framing the webcam, putting the recording on a background, cutting the dead air — has already happened by the time the window opens. Everything it decided is an ordinary slice you can move, retime or delete.
What do I need to record a product demo on my Mac?
An Apple Silicon Mac running macOS 14 or later, and the Screen Recording permission. If the demo involves typing into your product, granting Accessibility as well lets the zooms follow the field you are filling in — leave it off and clicks still drive them.
Does my demo footage get uploaded anywhere?
Not to make the video. Recording, editing and export all happen on your Mac's own media engine, so a demo full of customer data or an unreleased product never leaves the machine it was recorded on. There is no upload step and no cloud render.