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Ask HN: How do people create those sleek looking demos for startups?

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Re: Ask HN: How do people create those sleek looking demos for startups?

#131

Post by vunderba »

victorbjorklund wrote: post #66
jasperstory wrote: post #16

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…

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.

Re: Ask HN: How do people create those sleek looking demos for startups?

#132

Post by shihanwan1 »

imroot wrote: post #125
shihanwan1 wrote: post #106

https://asciinema.org/ 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.

Re: Ask HN: How do people create those sleek looking demos for startups?

#133

Post by rblatz »

jdewerd wrote: post #99
abraxas wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Ask HN: How do people create those sleek looking demos for startups?

#136

Post by chihuahua »

SushiHippie wrote: post #75

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.

This one was quite pointless. It's someone scrolling some web page from top to bottom, with a few gratuitous zooms and some mouse pointer movement. What am I supposed to take away from this? I can't even read all the text, and there's no voice-over, so really all it communicates is "we have a web page that says supercharge your growth with AI"

Re: Ask HN: How do people create those sleek looking demos for startups?

#138

Post by Terretta »

tomgs wrote: post #105
peteforde wrote: post #67

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 ta…

I actually do that as a service for companies: https://syntaxcinema.dev 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 sampl…

At what point in the process do I tell you I read somewhere that lack of pricing on a website sucks so give me a discount?

Some point before we've bargained on the pricing, or after? :-)

Re: Ask HN: How do people create those sleek looking demos for startups?

#139

Post by duckmysick »

jamesbfb wrote: post #96
jasperstory wrote: post #16

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…

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.

This would be difficult because mouse and window controls are different in X11 and Wayland.

Re: Ask HN: How do people create those sleek looking demos for startups?

#140

Post by lowkey_ »

Side note, but I see two YC-backed startups mentioning themselves in this thread:

Yarn - Make Videos Like The Best (W24) https://yarn.so Kite - Product Videos Made Easy (S23) https://kite.video

It's sort of crazy YC is backing so many hundreds of companies that there's this level of overlap. I assume one pivoted into this?

Still, crazy to imagine all the YC companies competing with each-other these days. I've even seen YC-backed 'incumbents' being disrupted by new YC-backed startups.

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