How to record a product demo video on a Mac.

The recording workflow

1. Pick one viewer and one result

   Write a single line: who is watching and what they will see happen. “A project manager turns a customer email into an assigned task in under a minute.” Everything that does not serve that line stays out.

2. Write the script

   Use the four-beat template below and write one sentence per click. Read it aloud once with a timer; cut until it fits the length for where the video will live.

3. Prepare the screen

   Turn on Do Not Disturb, switch to a demo account with sample data, close unrelated tabs, and set the window to the size you will record. Load every page you need before you start.

4. Record in one pass

   Press Shift-Command-5, select the area, choose your microphone in Options, and record. Pause for a second before and after each important click so you have clean places to cut.

5. Fix mistakes, not the whole take

   Trim the start and end. For a wrong click in the middle, cut it out or re-record only that section. Do not restart a good four-minute take for a ten-second error.

6. Check it at the size people will watch

   Play the export in a window as narrow as your website’s video player. If a button label is unreadable, zoom in on that moment or re-record it with a larger interface.

What a product demo video should include

Four beats, in this order. The share of runtime is our editorial guidance; the order is what matters. A demo that opens on the login screen and tours the menus has skipped the first beat and never reaches the third.

A product demo script template you can fill in

Copy the lines, replace the brackets, and read the result aloud. As a rule of thumb, 90 seconds of relaxed narration is a little over 200 words; if your draft is twice that, you are describing features, not showing a result.

Filled in for a task tracker, the first two lines read: “A customer request arrives by email. Today you retype it into the tracker and hope nothing gets lost.” The viewer now knows why the next 60 seconds matter.

• Problem (10–15 seconds): “[Viewer] has [situation]. Today that means [slow or error-prone step].”
• Setup (5 seconds): “This is [product], with [sample project or data] open.”
• Action (30–60 seconds): “I [click or type] [control name]. [Product] [what happens].” Repeat once per click, and name every control.
• Result (10–15 seconds): “Now [outcome]. That took [number] clicks, not [the old way].”
• Call to action (5–10 seconds): “[One next step] at [where to do it].”

How long a product demo video should be

Length follows placement. Someone on your homepage has not agreed to watch anything yet; someone who asked your sales team for a walkthrough has. These ranges are our recommendation, not a measured benchmark.

Prepare your screen before you record

Ten minutes here saves a retake. Every item below is something viewers notice and you cannot easily remove afterwards.

• Turn on Do Not Disturb so no message banner slides in at minute three.
• Use a demo account with sample data. Real customer names and emails in a public video are easier to keep out than to blur afterwards.
• Close unrelated tabs and apps; hide the bookmarks bar.
• Set a fixed 16:9 window or capture area, 1920×1080 for example, and note it. You need the same size if you re-record a section later.
• Increase the app’s zoom until labels are readable in a small player. Check with a ten-second test.
• Sign in and open every page you will visit, so the recording contains no loading screens or password prompts.
• In Shift-Command-5 > Options, turn on Show Mouse Clicks so viewers can see where you clicked.

Record a product demo for free with QuickTime and Shift-Command-5

The recorder that ships with macOS is enough for a first demo. It captures the screen and your microphone and saves a .mov file to the desktop.

Where it ends: Apple’s list of QuickTime Player editing features is trim, split into clips, rearrange, rotate or flip, add a clip, and remove audio or video. There is no zoom, no cursor styling, no blur, and no way to re-record a section in place. On macOS 14, 15, and 26 the built-in recorder also captures the microphone only, so a product that makes sound needs another route. A wrong click at minute four means splitting the file, deleting the bad part, recording a new clip at exactly the same window size, and adding it back by hand.

1. Press Shift-Command-5, or choose File > New Screen Recording in QuickTime Player.
2. Choose Record Selected Portion and drag the frame over your app. On macOS 26 Tahoe and later you can use Record Selected Window.
3. Open Options, choose your microphone, and turn on Show Mouse Clicks.
4. Click Record and run the script. Stop with the menu bar Stop button or Command-Control-Esc.
5. Open the file in QuickTime Player, choose Edit > Trim, drag the yellow handles past the dead time at the start and end, and click Trim.

Where Qreata saves time on a product demo

Qreata is a Mac recorder with an editor built for this kind of video. Three parts of it change how a demo gets made.

Zooms come from your real clicks. Turn on Auto-zoom on clicks (it is off by default, and it needs the macOS Accessibility permission to place clicks precisely) and Qreata zooms where you clicked. You can also add a zoom by hand, for the result screen that appears without a click. Each zoom has an editable start, duration (0.5–10 seconds), scale (1.2–4×), easing and focus point, and you can delete one that crops context the viewer needs.

Replace Take handles the wrong click. You open the wrong menu at 4:10 of a six-minute demo. Pick Replace Take (the Rerecord tool in the editor), Shift-drag across 4:05–4:20 on the timeline, put the app back in the state it was in at 4:05, and re-record that range. Screen, camera, microphone and system audio are replaced together. The range has to sit inside one segment and can’t cross a cut; a retake shorter than the range is rejected, and a longer one is trimmed. The other 5:45 stays as it was.

Capture works a little differently from Shift-Command-5. You choose Display, Window, Application or a preset Area (the center 80% or half of the screen); there is no free-drag region, so for a demo of one app pick Window. The cursor is recorded as data, which means you can resize it, hide it or highlight clicks after the take. In the Script panel, Remove silences cuts the pauses and Remove filler words takes out “um” and “uh” in English and Russian speech.

Export is MP4 in H.264 at 30 fps and up to 4K, with background, padding, and rounded corners applied to the frame if you want them. What Qreata does not do: text annotations or markup you can edit after recording (pen, arrow and box are drawn live while recording), automatic detection of sensitive data, and 60 frames per second. Sample data is still your first protection; for a field you cannot swap out, the Blur tool in the editor covers a rectangle for a time range, and Blur · select elements blurs the interface elements you pick while you record. Qreata runs on Apple Silicon Macs with macOS 14 or later; there is no Windows version.

To judge it in the 7-day trial, record your real demo script once, make one deliberate wrong click, and fix it with Replace Take. That is the whole comparison with the free route.

Questions about this workflow