ScreenToast / Guides / Product demo video on Mac

How to make a product demo video on a Mac

A good product demo is short, shows one idea, and never makes the viewer hunt for the cursor. This guide walks through the whole job on a Mac — planning, recording, polishing, narrating and exporting — in the order that saves you re-takes. The examples use ScreenToast, a Mac screen recorder built for demos, but the planning advice works with any tool.

1. Decide the one thing the demo shows

Write a single sentence: "After watching this, the viewer knows they can ___." Everything that doesn't serve that sentence gets cut. A demo that shows one workflow end to end beats a tour of every menu.

• Launch or landing-page video: the outcome first, then the two or three steps that get there.
• Feature announcement: the before, the new thing, the after.
• Tutorial: each step in order, slowly enough to follow.

2. Write the click path, not a script

List the clicks you'll make, in order — that's your storyboard. Rehearse it twice before recording so your hand knows the route; most demos look messy because the person recording is still finding their way. If you'll narrate, you can write the words afterwards: the click path is what matters on the day.

3. Pick the shape before you record

Decide where the video is going first, because cropping later throws picture away:

In ScreenToast, choose Area and press a number key to lock the recording box to that shape — 2 for 16:9, 3 for 9:16, 4 for 1:1. More on this in vertical screen recording.

4. Prepare a clean screen

• Use demo data. A fake customer list beats blurring a real one later.
• Hide everything else. Quit unrelated apps, hide desktop icons, close extra tabs, and turn on Do Not Disturb so no notification lands mid-take. ScreenToast keeps its own windows out of the recording, so the recorder never shows up in your shot.
• Make text big enough. Zoom your browser or app to 110–125% so text survives being watched on a phone.
• Slow your mouse down. Deliberate movements read better than fast ones — though cursor smoothing will rescue small wobbles.

5. Record in short takes

Record one section at a time instead of the whole demo in one go. If something goes wrong, pause, reset and carry on — in ScreenToast a pause never shows up in the finished video. Talking while you click is optional; many demos are recorded silently and narrated afterwards.

6. Polish: zooms, cursor, background

Raw screen recordings feel flat because the interesting part is a small patch of a big screen. Fix that with:

• Zooms on the important clicks. ScreenToast's Auto Polish places them on your clicks automatically; adjust or delete any you don't want. See auto zoom.
• A calm cursor that still lands on time.
• Trim the dead air and speed up anything that's just waiting for a page to load.
• A background and padding so the recording looks deliberate, not like a screenshot.
• Blur anything private — emails, names, keys. In ScreenToast the blur follows the zoom.

7. Add narration (or captions)

Sound turns a demo into a pitch. You have four options: talk over it yourself, add text callouts on screen, turn your voice into captions, or use a generated voice. ScreenToast drafts a script from what you did on screen so you're editing words rather than writing from scratch. Keep sentences short and let the picture do half the work.

8. Open and close with a card

Start with your product name so viewers know what they're watching, and end with where to get it: a URL, a "try it free" line, or your launch page. Two or three seconds each is enough.

9. Export for each platform

Export a version per destination rather than one file for everything. ScreenToast has ready-made settings for YouTube, TikTok, Reels, LinkedIn, X, Product Hunt and the web, a GIF option, plus a ProRes master for other editors, and it re-frames the picture when you switch shape rather than chopping the sides off.

A quick checklist

• One idea, stated in a sentence
• Click path rehearsed twice
• Shape chosen before recording
• Demo data, clean desktop, Do Not Disturb on
• Zooms on the clicks that matter, dead air trimmed
• Narration or on-screen text, intro and outro cards
• One export per platform