That one is ScreenStudio - it's a great product!
I'm a founder at Yarn (YC W24) – we're building in this space and launching on HN soonish.
We often see teams combining ScreenStudio with products like iMovie, AfterEffects, or Veed. Other products in the space to check out are Tella.tv, Kite, or Descript.
For more advanced motion graphics, you'll often need a freelancer or agency.
Feel free to drop me a message (email in bio) to talk through options!
Arcade looks genuinely great, so thanks for posting this question.
Several folks have already mentioned that the real value of screen capture tools is to create assets that can be used by a person whose job it is to explain abstract concepts to an audience. I would go so far as to say that if you're a founder, hiring someone who is really good at product videos is something you should 100% outsource even if you're talented with storytelling and motion graphics. It's a distraction from your key priorities, and you don't have enough distance from the subject matter to be objective about what's okay vs great.
I'd like to add that it's really debatable that a video where someone rapidly zips around an interface that they haven't used is actually something people want to see. I suspect that on its own, such a video is often not the huge win that it might seem.
Also, if a process is really easy (press a button, enter a credit card) then you can bet your ass people will soon be tired of seeing the same presentation with different marketing copy.
Things that were absolutely novel at one point include: agent chat widgets in the bottom right corner, presentations that tween and zoom on every slide, infinite scroll newsfeeds, captchas. All timeless things people love more and more every day, right?
To miss the sarcasm:
If the agent chat actually works, I like it.
For me it never does. Always throws me to a human agent. I haven't had a single case where a bot solved my issue.
The other day, the Synchrony chatbot was able to remove a fee that they had previously agreed to remove (delays on their end created a late fee on my end). I was shook.
But yeah, 99% of the time the bots are as useless as IVRs. "Please listen carefully as our menu options have changed. For quality assurance, your call may be monitored or recorded."
I think this is the biggest shift that us technically inclined people will need to make. Bots are becoming useful.
I actually do that as a service for companies:
I think that product tutorials are somewhat of a black art. On the one hand you have:
1. Keeping the flow moving and the video fast-paced and interesting
2. Adding aftereffects and other visual niceties
3. Pointing out the relevant bits with zooms, highlights, etc...
But on a deeper level, you also have questions of:
1. Am I using the right sample app to demonstrate my use case?
2. Is the feature I'm using bulletproof? Do I need to change something in the DOM of the application since that feature is not 100%? Do I need to not show a piece since it's irrelevant? Do I need to speed through or flip over from things while they're running / fetching / compiling / generating etc...?
3. And, maybe most importantly, what is the message I intended to deliver? Is that a product overview? A documentation-oriented video? A demo for a conference or a customer? Who's my audience? Am I speaking to them?
I've been doing videos for a while, and I found that the second part of the problem is actually not as easy as one would assume.
I applaud great YouTubers for that - they cracked how to do walkthroughs of products that are not only technically interesting, but also visually pleasing.
I'm a bit of a video nerd, I guess. I started out way back when doing these little nuggets of absolute terribleness (oh my god the thumbnail) https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlM7w0mARnn4ytxM6s-0b...
And happy to say I improved a little bit from then :)
(that website's pretty new, comments more than welcome)
Btw for Arcade - you can implement agent chats with our Intercom integration: https://app.arcade.software/share/B0jj3mbbJOWUrWvmzY2a?ref=s...
I find it kinda funny that the 'sleek demo' above is just zooming around their landing page.
It's also kinda sad we're at the point where a video of someone scrolling a webpage with an oversized mouse is considered a 'sleek demo', it wasn't even a smooth scroll at that.
It’s obv a person manipulating the mouse and scroll. It’s very uneven and jerky.
Do these tools provide HMI automation, where you script the mouse movements/clicks/scrolls during the recording?
No, but Screen Studio does allow you to tweak how the mouse appears to move, in the sense that you can make it move more smoothly or quickly.
To be fair, I’ve seen plenty of screen recordings which are far worse
Now I wonder if asking about the tool is a red herring to make us watch the video...
my demo would be much better guise --tips fedora--
Anyone a recommendation for Windows? Something simple and lightweight? (Screenstudio is Mac only)
I record these videos for my workplace on windows.
We use Loom + Davinci Resolve - it's nowhere near as smooth as screenstudio
With which of these 2 software can you do the "zoom in", "move mouse cursor", and "zoom out"?
It's done in two steps, first use loom to record the mouse movement in much higher res than needed and then use resolve to zoom, follow and frame as needed.
to record the mouse movement in much higher res than needed
how can this be done? if the monitor resolution is say 1600 x 900, how can it record the frames and/or mouse movement in higher resolution than this?
Blackmagic Atem Mini:
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/atemmini/techspecs...
And some hdmi cameras
not sure what you are proposing here? a hardware device that can zoom on a cursor?
The Mini wouldn't make anything like what's in the demo. It's good for multi-camera-angle, one-take videos. But it would also require cameras, lights, mics, etc. And you'd want at least a Mini ISO so you can fine-tune everything in post.
It's a live video mixer that you can use to switch between various sources of input - say, a demo device (or, in my case, a device under test), a front camera (or two) facing the presenter, a top camera showing how the presenter interacts with the device... supports a bunch of transitions, and if you get yourself the ISO variant, it records all audio and video tracks uncompressed together with a bunch of metadata that allows you to import the exact same cut as it was broadcast, and fine-tune aspects of it in post to get a refined video.
I'm saying I've used, and seen used, this tool to make very cool investor pitches and videos. It's not specifically the mouse zoom thing, but more generally a great way to make super high quality, professional looking pitches when you need to show things that are live.
Sorry to be that person but are there any free/OSS alternatives to the ones mentioned here? Mainly for macOS?
Free like QuickTime to Record/Capture Screen contents and iMovie to modify the material?
Not a direct alternative per se, as it is meant for coding, but https://syphon.github.io/ - I used to use this years ago and it worked great then for screen captures.
I'm linux-only so can't say for macos, but I use OBS to record and Kdenlive[1] to edit. It will take a bit more effort to get some of the effects like the zoom as Kdenlive is full video editing software, but it's a skill that IMHO is well worth the 45 mins to an hour it takes to get comfortable.
the biggest pain for product demo is to have fake user data to populate the UI.
This is the main problem we are facing right now.
We are looking for tools that can generate fake data(may be based on our small set of data) for live demo setup.
You could try using something like Synth[0]! You can hook it up to a database, it'll generate some json describing the shape and types of your data based on your database (or you could write the json yourself), then you can use Synth to generate fake data and directly insert it into your database.
Full disclosure, I'm the maintainer, but it's not like it'll cost you anything.
Faker.js works pretty great. You can also just set up the fake data yourself in the database.
https://arcade.software is a different solution in the same category.
Very good alternative, thanks for sharing
Happy to answer any questions about Arcade!
The carousel on top does some weird flashing on Android Chrome.
Anyone know an app that does this for mobile devices? Specifically iphones
seconding this
Screen.studio can also record your iPhone’s screen if you connect it to your Mac with a cable.
We use this for really nice terminal only demos. Highly recommend even though there are some minor rendering issues if you are using special fonts.
I'm a huge fan of charmbracelet's vhs:
https://github.com/charmbracelet/vhs
I have a gitlab CI job to update my demo .gif's every time I update my application; always ensures that things are up-to-date and provides gif/video recording that I've ran specific commands (perfect for auditors!)
Woah, great suggestion! Gonna dig into it and see if I get a similar setup as yours.
https://rotato.app/ Is another option if you’re looking for something more 3D
A worth mention, thanks!
but do you pronounce it rotayto or rotahto?
No specifically for video, but I've always had a soft spot for this site:
https://tiffzhang.com/startup/
It semi-randomly creates the site of a recently-launched startup. It is nine years old now, and completely nailed the overused style of the time.
The company names are also excellent. I wonder how many accidentally became real.
I like how the current customers exist within the same fake startup universe
This Twitter thread was great recently on this topic, lots of useful software to consider: https://twitter.com/igorexit/status/1785288743802609993
I don't have a Twitter account, where are the responses?
That one is screen.studio
Yup. screen.studio is probably the most popular one out there. And it's nice that it's a one time license purchase instead of a subscription.
Hi everyone! I'm the CEO of Arcade (who a few people have already mentioned...thanks!).
+1 to that being ScreenStudio.
Sometimes people import ScreenStudio videos into Arcade to add branching, annotations, and get analytics about who is engaging with the tool.
We're about to announce a big release on May 17th which will be very relevant - we're going to show how you can capture beyond the browser and get even more powerful analytics (https://www.linkedin.com/events/7189307779977818112).
Happy to answer any questions here as well.
Thanks for featuring Intercom in your site :-)
How do people make those animated videos like AWS use for their products?
The flat 2d animated diagrams?
I made the demo video for https://plandex.ai myself using CleanShot X (https://cleanshot.com/), Adobe Premiere Pro, an effect I bought in Adobe's marketplace, some AppleScript automation, and music from SoundStripe (https://soundstripe.com/).
It was my first time using all these tools. It took me a couple days to make the video. Premiere is a bit of a beast, but by just asking ChatGPT how to do everything, I was able to get up to speed with it pretty fast.
CleanShot is also included with SetApp
For a website only, if you record the browser tab, on Mac this is pretty trivial with the trackpad.
You can do similar with more effort video editing software like DaVinci Resolve
You can make a video like that with OBS and Kdenlive. The main thing is having the skills to edit a video.
We use https://kite.video for our demos and it works great for that style of video
For product videos I used OBS a lot: https://obsproject.com/
I haven't used Journey, but it seems promising for product Tours: https://www.william-troup.com/journey-js/
When I started creating demos for our startup, I started with Shotcut, it is pretty awesome and simple to start with. VN editor is also a good option if you are just starting your journey. And combine your screen recording with some animations and images. Hope this may help you.
ScreenStudio and Arcade are great. If you're looking for an in-product demo/tour, there's driver.js
I don't know about other demos but that one in particular would be trivially easy to create using KDE's desktop effects zoom feature and OBS screen recording (tell it to record a specific window).
What's the one that has the rainbow line cursor option?
Others mentioned ScreenStudio (which is awesome), but if you don't need all of its features (or can't afford it at the moment), I've found ScreenRun to be a great alternative: https://screenrun.app/
It's browser-based, but there's a Mac (and Windows I think) companion app that records the screen with click-tracking for zooming (as it's not possible with browser screen sharing just yet). It's somehow limited compared to ScreenStudio, and the interface feels cheaper compared to a native Swift app, but for my needs it gets the job done.
A video of someone scrolling through their website is a sleek looking demo?
smdh.
Capcut
Supademo is great for creating interactive demos. You record your screen then script out the actions a user would take. Super simple.
For the hackers looking for ways to do it with code there's Remotion
Hey, while being on that topic and somehow related. There seems to be kind of a default company that creates those catchy tech marketing videos, explainers etc: https://sandwich.co
Examples you may know:
- https://sandwich.co/work/playdate/
- https://sandwich.co/work/auth0-2/
- https://sandwich.co/work/slack-wfh/That’s probably Screen Studio. I use it a lot to create feature demo videos.
For more sleek promo videos, I would work with a professional.
For example this one is probably better for ad etc:
I use Camtasia and it's pretty good. It also does a lot of things related to audio/video, not just recording.
I use screen.studio
Presentation is close to entertainment business, a whole domain in itself. Takes time to master the craft but you can take inspiration from parody bits like "Every BBC series about the universe": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOA5vnUt00c
From the linked video, I saw video panning with mouse movement and zoom-to-clicks ... I think Camtasia can do those? For sure on the zoom, less sure on the panning. Camtasia is commercial and cross-platform.
Added benefit is that I think Camtasia is relatively easy to pickup compared to other tools I've tried to use.
Screen studio is amazing for that; Loom is also pretty great
Lots of good tools for this.
One way to do it completely free is OBS + Kdenlive. The interface for both leaves something to be desired but both open source and have all the features you would want (though sometimes buried in menus)
Highly recommend looking at Kite (https://kite.video), YC company.
Easy to make these videos, edit, match music to it, etc.
we record our screens with screen studio and they go pretty viral
CEO at Kite (YC S23) here, thanks for the mentions!
Like Screen Studio, Kite lets you record your screen and automatically zoom in on the action.
But with some key upgrades:
- Combine multiple recordings
- Add text scenes with animations
- Place your recordings on a 3D device like a phone or laptop
- Add music and AI voiceovers
With lots more in the works.
It's still early, but we have lots of startups using Kite regularly for feature-launch videos. We're live on Mac OS and have a waitlist for Windows.
Get in touch if you have pain points in this space. Happy to chat any time!
Outsourcing is the simplest thing that might work. There are probably better uses of your time. Good luck.
I know you are talking about a one off demo
But if you want a nice 90s edit of every 1h sales demo meeting check out DemoTime.
We love love love https://arcade.software/
It's not a technology problem, or at least only partially a technology problem.
This is probably a screen recording with a bit of video editing on top. My fiancée does this sort of thing on a contract basis sometimes.
We've had good success with Kite. Plus the free tier doesn't include a watermark
My 2 cents:
I really don't like these demos, they are really nauseating to me.
As I generally don't like videos with many/fast transitions like many popular YouTube videos and movies are, I'm probably a minority in this regard.
It's most definitely ScreenStudio. I recently used it to create a demo for Upscayl too! https://twitter.com/upscayl/status/1784705006500733382
I tend to use TechSmith Camtasia. It will do all that stuff, and also lets you add all kinds of active overlays and effects.
ScreenFlow is also good.
But it's still a lot of hard work, making these. I suspect that AI tools can help, but, in the aggregate, it still needs a skilled eye and hand, to make stuff look good, and not obnoxious.
Mac only?
Many of the apps are macOS only unfortunately. For Windows, there's Descript or Camtasia. Linux not sure, but Descript and Veed are browser-based.
I chuckled when you said you weren't sure about Linux tools. Real Linux users code all their sleek demo videos inside emacs in hex.
Unfortunately this is one of the places where Linux really doesn't have any good options. While there are definitely raw capture options for Linux, there isn't anything as nice as Screen Studio or Screen Flow or Camtasia for quick, short videos with basic editing.
On Linux I've used SimpleScreenRecorder. Can invoke ffmpeg to screengrab too.
Yes, I use Camtasia for over a decade. It not only solves screen recording but also most other tasks you would need cutting video and sound.
ScreenStudio looks nice. And thank god a pay once app.
Agreed, as far as I can tell, this is the only one in the space that doesn't insist upon a monthly payment.
Yep although to be precise it's a pay-for-a-year-of-updates model, and the underlying macOS APIs in this space change significantly between minor and major macOS releases, so ymmv in terms of "pay once forever". (For upcoming features like shareable links, they'll presumably move to a part-subscription pricing model.)
I’m a dev lead who is a rusted on Linux user, I’ve always hated that ScreenStudio is Mac only since it’s a great product. Any plans for Linux support? I would love the ability to dem stuff and have it actually look pretty.
The problem is that a lot of the details requires macOS accessibility permissions (identifying active window, measuring cursor movements), so there's non-trivial platform specific code.
For product demos specifically, best bet might be a Chrome-extension-based product like Arcade!
How long is the Yarn wait list?
Not sure. Hopefully next 4-6 weeks. Building as fast as possible with current teams – but lots of tricky webGL, Swift, and headless Chrome involved.
+1 for ScreenStudio, use it and love it.
Another +1 for Screen studio. I use it legitimately daily in my Product Design job, and not just for customer-facing demo videos.
A lot of fragmented promise for video editing amongst these different apps. Hopefully someone will make a comparison chart for these. Good luck on your launch!
ScreenStudio looks amazing, thanks for sharing
ScreenStudio is really good, I use it for all of my capture. Main feature I find missing is ability to reorder or combine multiple recordings into one clip, or add audio from within the app.