How to create a product demo video

01Decide what the demo has to prove

A demo is an argument, not a tour. Before recording, write the single sentence you want someone to believe at the end. Everything that does not serve that sentence is what makes demos run long.

Two minutes is a useful ceiling. Under thirty seconds you cannot establish a problem; past two minutes you are competing with a pricing page that answers faster.

• Open on the problem, not on your logo or your dashboard
• Show one workflow end to end rather than five features partially
• End on the finished artefact, because that is the thing people remember
• Write the click path down first so you are not thinking while recording

02Record the window, not the desktop

The source picker lists every connected display with a live thumbnail, and a separate tab crops the capture to a region you draw. For a demo, pick the application window: it keeps your other monitors, your dock and your notification corner out of the frame without any cleanup.

Frame rate, system audio, microphone and webcam are all chosen in that same dialog, with a live camera preview before you commit. The window then hides itself and recording is controlled from the tray, so the app you are demoing is the only thing on screen.

03Give it a background instead of cleaning your desktop

The recorded window sits on a background you choose: a solid colour, one of fifteen gradients, or one of eight supplied images, with adjustable Gaussian blur. Padding around the window goes up to 200 pixels, and the window itself takes a drop shadow and a corner radius up to 40 pixels.

This is the step that separates a demo that looks produced from one that looks like a support recording, and it costs nothing at record time. You are not tidying a desktop or hiding an icon row, because neither is in the frame.

04Let the zoom follow the work, then correct it

Automatic zoom follows the cursor, and three separate controls decide how it behaves: intensity from 1.0x to 4.0x, mouse smoothing from 0 for instant tracking to 1 for maximum lag, and zoom speed from slow to instant. Set them once and they apply to every recording after.

Automatic zoom is right most of the time and wrong at the moments that matter, usually when the important thing is not where your pointer happens to be. Any individual zoom can be switched off cursor-following and pointed at a fixed spot using a crosshair on a preview canvas. Two or three corrections is normal for a two minute demo.

05Make the pointer readable

The cursor is redrawn rather than captured, which is why it can be changed after the recording exists. Twelve pointer styles, adjustable size and shadow, a tilt option that leans the pointer into its direction of travel, and a setting that hides it whenever it stops moving.

That last one matters more than it sounds. A pointer parked in the middle of the frame while you talk is the most common thing that makes an otherwise clean demo look unfinished.

06Add a face only where it helps

A webcam overlay sits in one of eight positions on a 3x3 grid, sized between 5 and 40 percent of frame height, with a border radius that runs from square to a circle. A digital zoom from 1.0x to 3.0x crops into the camera feed itself, which is how you keep a messy room out of shot without moving furniture.

For a launch demo, a face at the start and the end works better than a bubble present for the whole runtime. The middle is where the product should have the frame to itself.

07Fix the audio you already recorded

Microphone and system audio arrive as separate tracks with independent volume, so a loud notification does not force you to re-record the narration. On the Pro tier, six voice processing controls are applied at export rather than baked into the recording: cleanup, adaptive noise suppression, bass boost, voice clarity, voice boost and a de-esser around 7 kHz.

All of it runs on your own processor. There is no upload, no API key and no per-minute credit to watch, which also means the length of the demo has no bearing on the cost.

08Export at the size the channel wants

Six aspect ratios cover YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, X, LinkedIn and Facebook, plus the source dimensions. The Pro tier exports up to 4K at 24, 30, 60 or 120 fps with GPU accelerated rendering; the free tier tops out at 720p with a watermark, which is enough to test the workflow on your own material before paying anything.

GIF output is unusual in this category and worth knowing about: a fifteen second loop in a README or a changelog entry often does more work than a two minute video nobody presses play on.