How to Record an Investor Pitch Demo Video on Mac

An investor pitch demo video should run 60 to 90 seconds and show one real task in your product from start to finish. Export it as an H.264 MP4 and embed it in the deck so it plays without Wi-Fi. To get there:

1. Script it to about 150 to 225 words.
2. Record it in one clean take.
3. Cut every wait and zoom in on the clicks that matter.
4. Test the deck with the network off, on the laptop you'll present from.

What investors want from a pitch demo video

A pitch demo has a narrower job than a sales demo. It isn't a feature tour. It answers one question: does the thing your slides describe exist, and does it work?

A demo that does this well has these traits:

• One workflow. Show the core action your deck is about, from the problem state to the result. Leave out settings screens, onboarding and secondary features.
• Believable data. Use a demo account with realistic names and numbers. Placeholder text and empty dashboards make a product look unfinished. Real customer data shouldn't appear at all.
• Readable on a meeting-room TV or a shared call. Small UI text that looks fine on your laptop becomes unreadable on a screen across the room or in a shrunken screen-share window. Zooms solve this.
• No dead time. Cut loading spinners, long typed email addresses and waits for pages to load.
• It plays every time. A recorded demo removes the risks of a live one, such as a bad conference-room network, an expired login or a staging server that goes down that day. Keep the live product open in another window for "can I see X?" questions after the pitch.

Plan for two versions of the same video:

1. A silent version for the live meeting, where you talk over it.
2. A narrated version for the data room or a follow-up email, where nobody is there to explain it.

Script the 90 seconds

Write the script before you open the recorder. At a steady speaking pace of about 150 words a minute (the rate Screen Bolt's teleprompter uses for its reading-time estimate), a 60-second demo holds about 150 words and a 90-second demo about 225. If your draft runs long, cut steps rather than talking faster.

This structure fits most products:

Write each line as one action plus what you say about it. Here's a short example for an invoicing product, with cue markers as reminders for yourself:

This is Maya's inbox on the 1st of the month: 40 unpaid invoices. [PAUSE]
She opens Collections and filters by "overdue". [SLOW]
One click drafts a reminder for every client, in her own tone.
She reviews one, edits a line, and sends all 40. [EMPHASIS]
Two weeks later, the dashboard shows 31 of them paid. [PAUSE]

For more structures, see our product demo video script template.

Read the script while you record

Screen Bolt has a built-in teleprompter. To open it, click the Script button on the recording bar or press ⇧⌘T (Shift-Command-T). Then paste your script or click Import .txt. The teleprompter window is not captured in the recording, so you can place it right next to what you're recording.

The header shows a word count and an estimated reading time. Use it to check whether the script fits 90 seconds. Cue markers such as [PAUSE], [SLOW] and [EMPHASIS] appear as colored chips in the teleprompter only. In Auto Scroll mode the text starts moving when the recording starts, and it pauses when you pause. More in how to read a script while recording.

Record the demo in one clean take

Prepare the screen

• Use a demo account with seeded data. Log in and open the starting page.
• Hide browser bookmarks and extensions you don't need, and close unrelated tabs.
• Turn on Do Not Disturb so no notifications appear mid-take. Open Control Center, click Focus, then choose Do Not Disturb.
• Size the browser window the way you'll record it. A window close to 16:9 fits a widescreen slide with little empty space.

Our checklist for preparing your Mac for a clean screen recording covers the rest.

Record in Screen Bolt

1. Press ⌘, (Command-Comma) to open Settings.
2. On the Recording tab, check that Create zooms automatically is on and that After recording is set to Open editor.
3. On the Quick export tab, pick a Frame rate. This setting also sets the recording frame rate. 60 FPS is the default and gives smoother scrolling and cursor motion. 30 FPS is enough for a click-through demo.
4. On the recording bar, click Window, click your browser window, then click Record Window to confirm it. If you only want part of the screen, use Area instead.
5. Click Mic and choose your microphone. Record narration even if you'll talk over the video live, because you can mute it later to make the silent version.
6. Click the red record button. There is no countdown, so wait a second before your first click and trim the start later.
7. Click through your script. Use Pause if you need to reset something. If the take goes wrong early, use Discard and restart.
8. Click Stop. The editor opens with zooms already created from your clicks. Blur zones you draw with the Blur button before recording don't blur a Window-mode recording, because Screen Bolt captures the window itself. Use a demo account so there's nothing to hide, or blur afterward in the editor (see below).

Click so auto zoom works for you

Screen Bolt turns your mouse clicks into zooms after the recording. These habits help the zooms land well:

• Click once, then pause. Clicks within 1 second and 200 pixels of each other merge into one zoom, and each zoom holds for at least 1.8 seconds. Rapid clicking across the screen produces jumpy zooms.
• Keep the cursor near what matters. The zoom center comes from the cursor position, and you can't move a zoom's focus point by hand later.
• Typing and drags don't create zooms. If the key moment is a typed search or a dragged card, add a zoom manually in the editor.

More on how auto zoom works.

Edit it down to 90 seconds

Cut the waits

1. Press Space to play.
2. At the start of a wait (a page load, a spinner, a fumbled click), press I to set an In point.
3. Where the action resumes, press O to set an Out point.
4. Click Cut I-O or press Delete.
5. Repeat for every gap.
6. Drag the clip edges to trim the silence at the start and end.

To split the clip at the playhead, press S. You can then delete or move a section as a whole. The full set of timeline tools is in the editing docs.

Set the speed

The speed menu under the timeline (it shows "1x") sets the speed of the whole export. The options are 0.25x, 0.5x, 0.75x, 1x, 1.25x, 1.5x, 2x, 3x and 4x. For example, 1.25x turns a 100-second take into 80 seconds.

J and L also lower or raise this speed by 0.25 while playing, and that change is exported too. If you use those keys, check the menu before you export.

If only one section is slow, cut it instead of speeding it up. In version 1.11.5, speed ramps on an In/Out range play in the editor preview but export at normal speed.

Tune the zooms

Open the Zoom panel (⌘5).

• Default Level sets the zoom for new regions, from 1.2× to 6.0× (default 2.0×). On a meeting-room screen, 1.5× to 2.5× keeps the surrounding context visible and still makes text readable. To change existing regions too, click Apply to All Regions.
• To change how fast a zoom moves, right-click a zoom region on the timeline and choose Transition Speed. Smooth (0.60s) or Cinematic (1.0s) reads calmer in a pitch than Fast (0.15s).
• Press ⌘K (Command-K) to add a zoom at the playhead for moments auto zoom missed, such as typing.
• Delete zooms that don't help by right-clicking them and choosing Delete This Region. Not every click needs one.

Leave Auto Zoom on Click on. Turning it off disables every zoom in the preview and the export, including the ones you added by hand.

Make it fit the slide

• In the Screen panel, set Canvas ▸ Aspect Ratio to 16:9 so the video fills a widescreen slide.
• In the Background panel, choose a Wallpaper, or use your own brand image under Image. Avoid custom gradients and solid colors here. In 1.11.5, custom gradient colors export as the selected wallpaper's gradient, and a solid color exports as a dark gradient.
• To show the app with no background around it, set Padding to 0%.
• Skip device frames. They appear in the editor preview but are not included in the exported file.

Hide anything private

If real email addresses slipped into the recording, open the Effects panel and use Blur / Privacy ▸ Auto-Detect Sensitive Text. The scan runs on your Mac and adds blur regions over email addresses. It can also cover phone numbers if you turn that option on, and any custom keywords you enter.

Run the scan after your cuts and speed are final. Detections aren't re-timed if you cut, reorder clips or change speed afterward. Before exporting, review each blur on the blur track. To add a blur region by hand, press B.

Optional: add your face

A small webcam bubble can make the narrated data-room version feel like you're presenting. Before you record, click Camera on the recording bar and pick a camera. Our guide to recording a presentation with a webcam on Mac covers framing and placement.

Export the MP4

1. Click Export in the editor toolbar.
2. Choose Format ▸ MP4. MP4 uses H.264, which Keynote, PowerPoint, QuickTime and browsers all play. MOV uses HEVC, which makes smaller files but may not play on every Windows PC that ends up running your deck. The trade-offs are in MP4 vs MOV.
3. Choose Quality ▸ 1080p. That matches a standard 16:9 slide. The free version only allows 720p.
4. Check the size estimate in the summary line. For a smaller file, close the sheet, change Compression in Settings ▸ Quick export, then open the sheet again. Studio gives the highest bitrate and Web (Low) the lowest.
5. Click Export. The file goes to your Desktop by default, with a name like Screen Bolt 2026-11-14 at 10.32.05.mp4.
6. Rename the file to something an investor will recognize, such as Acme-demo-90s.mp4.

To make the silent version:

1. Open the Audio panel (⌘4).
2. Set Microphone volume to 0%. If system audio was recorded, set System Audio to 0% too.
3. Export again and give the file a different name.

Don't use the Share button for any of this. It sends the raw, unedited recording, not your edited export.

Free vs paid: the free version of Screen Bolt records without limits. Its exports are capped at 3 minutes and 720p, and they carry a "Made with Screen Bolt" watermark. That's fine for a rough cut. For the version investors see, you'll probably want 1080p without the watermark, which needs a Pro license ($79 one-time, as of November 2026). The free 3-minute cap is checked against the full recording length, not the trimmed result. On the free version, keep each take under 3 minutes. See Screen Bolt pricing.

Embed the demo in Keynote, PowerPoint or a data room

Keynote

1. Go to the demo slide.
2. Drag the MP4 from Finder onto the slide.
3. Resize the video to fill the slide. A 16:9 export on a 16:9 deck fills it edge to edge.
4. Select the video and open the Format sidebar.
5. Use the movie options to set how the video starts, whether it repeats and its volume.
6. Save the deck.

Keynote normally copies the movie into the .key file, so it travels with the deck. The offline test below confirms this.

PowerPoint

1. On the Insert tab, choose Video.
2. Insert the MP4 from your Mac as an embedded file, not a link.
3. Select the video and use the Playback tab to choose how it starts.
4. Save the deck.
5. Copy the .pptx to another folder or a USB drive and open it from there. If the video is missing, it was linked rather than embedded, so insert it again.

If you built the deck in Keynote, you can choose File ▸ Export To ▸ PowerPoint. Open the result in PowerPoint and check that the video plays before you send it.

Google Slides, PDF decks and data rooms

• Google Slides inserts video from YouTube or Google Drive, so playback depends on a connection. For an in-person pitch, present from Keynote or PowerPoint, or keep the MP4 ready to play from your Desktop.
• Don't count on video inside a PDF deck. If your deck goes out as a PDF, send the MP4 alongside it as its own file. Mention it on the relevant slide, for example "90-second demo: Acme-demo-90s.mp4".
• Data rooms: upload the narrated MP4 as a separate file with a clear name, and put the length in the file name. Open it from the data room yourself to see how it previews. If it can only be downloaded, a standard MP4 still opens on any computer.

Test offline playback before the meeting

Run this check on the laptop you'll actually present from:

1. Copy the deck and both MP4s to that Mac's local disk. Don't use a cloud-synced folder that may not have finished downloading the files.
2. Turn off Wi-Fi.
3. Start the deck from the first slide in presentation mode and let the demo slide play to the end.
4. If you can, connect an external display or TV. Check that the video fills the screen and the zoomed text is readable from across the room.
5. Check the volume. The silent version should be silent, and the narrated version shouldn't be too loud.
6. Put a copy of the deck and the MP4s on a USB drive in case you end up presenting from someone else's computer.

If the video stutters on an older machine, re-export at 30 FPS or with a lower Compression setting. Both give the computer less to decode.

Common mistakes

• Showing too much. If you show three features in 90 seconds, none of them land. Pick the one your raise depends on.
• Not zooming. In a full-screen 1080p capture, a dense dashboard is unreadable on a meeting-room TV.
• Leaving in the waits. Every spinner and page load makes the product feel slow.
• Linking instead of embedding. Anything that streams from the web can fail in a room with bad Wi-Fi.
• Bringing the narrated version to a live meeting. Your recorded voice and your live voice will talk over each other. Play the silent version.

If your sales team will reuse the recording, the sales demo video guide covers the longer, objection-handling version.