Get your real product UI into the film
How to choose, capture and reuse the product screens that carry a demo — from screenshots or a short walkthrough recording — so the film shows the product working instead of describing it.
Frame24 can read your website and get the positioning, the brand and the public imagery from it. What it cannot do is sign in. For most software companies that means the single most persuasive material — the product actually doing the job — has to be handed over deliberately. This guide is about doing that well, in about ten minutes, and never having to do it again.
1. Choose the screens that carry the argument
Start from the sentence the film has to leave behind: after watching, this person should understand that [product] makes [job] [better in this specific way]. Then pick the smallest number of screens that prove it. Almost always that is three: the state before the work, the moment of the work, and the outcome.
The instinct is to choose the screens you are proudest of — the dense dashboard, the settings panel with everything in it. Those are the screens that prove effort. The ones that prove value usually look quieter: an empty inbox, a finished document, a number that has moved.
| Screen | What it is doing in the film | Common mistake |
|---|---|---|
| The before | Establishes the problem in the product's own terms | Skipping it, so the outcome has nothing to be better than |
| The action | Shows a person doing one specific thing | A tour of the interface instead of a single action |
| The outcome | Makes the result visible and legible | A success toast nobody can read at 9:16 |
| The optional fourth | One piece of proof: a number, a list, an export | Adding three more features because they exist |
2. Capture them, one of two ways
Screenshots and a walkthrough recording are both first-class sources. They suit different situations rather than different skill levels.
Capturing product screens
- Screenshots, when you know exactly what you want to showCapture a full browser window at the size you really use — around 1440px wide — rather than a cropped detail. Frame24 re-frames each screen per format, and it can only move within what you gave it. Upload them in the order the story runs.
- A walkthrough recording, when the flow matters more than the framesRecord two to five minutes of yourself doing the one job, talking as you go. The recording is read for its timeline, its narration and the moments where the screen meaningfully changes, and the useful frames are selected from it. You do not need to be a good presenter: nothing of the recording is published unless you ask for it.
- Name them once, reuse them foreverCaptured screens are saved to your library with a name and the workflow position they came from. Later films pull from the same library, which is why the second film takes minutes rather than the first film's half hour.
- Swap real data for invented data after the factCapture first, sanitise second. Names, emails, sums and dates can be replaced with plausible substitutes that keep the same shape, so the layout still reads correctly. A screen you refused to capture cannot be recovered later.
3. Let the frame keep its context
A common request is to zoom hard into a single control. It rarely works. A number is proof of something only while you can still see it is a number on a dashboard; a button filling the frame could belong to any product on earth. Frame24 therefore shows the whole screen by default and leans toward the subject only when a claim needs it, pushing further only when something would otherwise be illegible.
- Keep the product's own chrome — the sidebar and the header are what make it recognisably your product.
- Let the cursor travel across a visible interface rather than appearing inside a crop of one control.
- If text on a screen is too small to read at 9:16, rewrite the screen rather than zooming until the context is gone.
4. What to check before you render
Watch the draft once with the sound off. You are checking three things: that the product is recognisable within the first three seconds, that the action reads as an action rather than a slideshow of states, and that the outcome is on screen long enough to be read twice. Everything else — pacing, music, a line of narration — is a sentence-long edit afterwards.
Questions people ask
Can Frame24 see my product if it is behind a login?
Not from a public URL. A crawler stops at the sign-in page, which is why the product screens are provided by you — as screenshots or a short walkthrough recording — rather than guessed at. That is a deliberate boundary: nothing asks you for your password.
How many product screenshots do I need for a demo video?
Three or four for a 30-second film, five or six for a 60-second one. More than that and the film becomes a tour, which is the most common reason a demo stops being watched.
What resolution should product screenshots be?
Capture at the size you actually use the product — a full browser window at 1440px wide is ideal. Screens are re-framed for each format rather than cropped, so a generous capture gives the camera somewhere to move.
Can I use screens with real customer data in them?
You can capture them, and you should — a discarded screen is gone, while real data can be swapped for invented data afterwards. Keep the shape (a five-figure sum stays five figures) so the layout still reads correctly.
Do I have to re-upload screens for every video?
No. Captured screens are saved to your library and reused across films, which is what makes the second and third film so much faster than the first.
Keep reading
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