Recording yourself

The screen

What the viewer sees: your slides, full screen, with you in a small bubble in one corner, camera on. Nobody is asked to watch a face for ten minutes, and nobody is asked to trust a voice with no face behind it.

• Bubble bottom right, small.
• Leave that corner clear on every slide before you record. Never let the bubble sit on a number.
• Share the slide window, not the whole desktop.
• Notifications off before you press record.

The camera

• Lens at eye level or a little above. Never below: a laptop on the desk films your chin and the ceiling. A stack of books under it fixes this.
• Arm's length from the lens, 50 to 70 cm. Head and shoulders in frame with a little room above your head.
• Look at the lens when you make the claim, at the slide when you point at it.
• Wipe it. Laptop lenses carry a week of fingerprints and every one of them is a soft, gray picture.

The light

• Light in front of you, never behind you. A window behind you makes you a silhouette on any camera.
• One soft source at face height. A desk lamp bounced off a wall or aimed through a sheet of paper is enough. Turn the overhead off; it lights the top of your head and darkens your eyes.
• Face the window if there is one. Daylight from the front is the best light you will not pay for.

The background

• A plain wall or a tidy shelf, a metre or more behind you.
• No virtual background. The edges crawl and the codec spends its bits on them.
• Nothing in shot that reads as a brand you are not pitching.

The sound

The one thing worth real time. A viewer forgives a soft picture and does not forgive a voice they have to work to hear.

• The earbuds from your phone, or the phone itself recording a voice memo, over the laptop microphone. The laptop microphone sits next to the fan.
• Microphone 5 to 8 cm from your mouth and just off to the side, so breath does not hit it.
• A soft room: a bedroom, a closet with clothes in it, a couch. Not the kitchen or the bathroom, where every sentence comes back at you off the tile.
• Fans, the air conditioner and the fridge off if you can reach them. Phone on silent.
• Record ten seconds of silence, play it back with headphones, and listen to what the room is saying before you say anything.

The delivery

• Headline first, then the point. Say a sentence. Never read a paragraph.
• Name the product and the problem in the first thirty seconds. A room sits through a slow build because it is in a room. Nobody watching a file will.
• About a minute a slide. Ten minutes is the most, not the target; seven is fine. Past ten, the end does not get watched.
• Stand if you can. A standing voice carries and a standing body stops reading.
• Two run-throughs before the take. They save more time than any editing will.
• Know the headline of every slide by heart, so a lost thread has somewhere to land. A recording has no question from the room to restart you.

The recorder: Cap

One app, so the room is not debugging six. Cap is free, open source, runs on Mac and Windows, records locally with no time limit, and puts you in the bubble. Nothing else on the list does all four.

1. Download it at cap.so and open it. Choose Studio Mode, which records to your machine and never to the cloud.
2. Choose the slide window as the source. Turn the camera on and set it to floating; drag the bubble to the bottom right and make it small.
3. Pick your microphone: the earbuds, not the built-in one.
4. Record five seconds, stop, play it back. Sound, bubble, corner. Then the real take.
5. Export from the editor: MP4, 1080p. Trim only the start and the end.

If Cap will not run on your machine, use Zoom: start a meeting alone, share the slide window, camera on, Record to this computer. The MP4 lands in your Zoom folder when you end the meeting. Tell me today, not Sunday, if you are on this path.

Not the pitch, but good to know: Tella is free for students for six months on a school email and makes the nicest layouts; Screen Studio (Mac, paid) makes the most polished demos; Loom's free plan stops at five minutes; PowerPoint, Keynote and Google Slides record the voice but not the bubble, so they are not enough on their own.

The take and the file

• One take you are willing to keep. Trim the start and the end. Do not cut inside a sentence; the seam shows and the viewer stops trusting the rest.
• Export MP4, H.264, 1080p, 30 frames a second. A ten-minute file at those settings runs 150 to 300 MB, so the upload starts before the night it is due.
• Play the whole file back with headphones before you upload it. This is where the missing minute and the muted first sentence get found.
• Name it so the person receiving twenty of them can find yours: lastname-pitch.mp4, and the deck as lastname-pitch.pdf beside it.

The same rules on a live call

Everything above holds on a call, with four more things.

• Camera on for the first minute at least. People decide who is in the room by who they can see.
• Mute when you are not speaking, and know the mute key without looking for it.
• Share a window, not a desktop.
• Join two minutes early with the slides already open, so nobody watches you find the file.

How the good ones do it

The rules for a recorded pitch are the rules for a good poster: one idea, big type, a sentence not a label, the person visible.

• Kevin Hale of Y Combinator: say what it does in two sentences a stranger could repeat, and keep the slides legible, simple and obvious.
• Nancy Duarte: one idea per slide, and a viewer gets it in three seconds or the slide has become a teleprompter.
• Airbnb's 2009 seed deck: every statement fits on one line, and its best slide is a single sentence about a ten percent commission.
• Sandwich, who make the launch films for Slack and Square: the founder on camera, the product in use, the whole thing under two minutes.
• Patrick Winston: open with a promise of what the listener will know at the end, never with a joke.
• Mike Monteiro: stand up, do not explain what they can already see, and be ready to explain every decision you made.

Further reading

Each of these is here for one reason, stated.

• How to pitch your startup, Kevin Hale, Y Combinator, and the talk on video. The two-sentence description and the legible, simple, obvious deck.

• 4 tips and 1 tool that will help you perfect your slide design, Duarte. One idea per slide and the glance test, from slide:ology. Her TED talk is the shape of a talk in eighteen minutes.

• Airbnb pitch deck: teardown and redesign, Slidebean. The 2009 seed deck slide by slide, and what a redesign changes.

• Sandwich. Watch three of the films. Count how long before the founder appears and how long before the product is used.

• How to Speak, Patrick Winston, MIT. An hour on delivery; the first ten minutes are the opening.

• 8 ways to craft an unforgettable Config talk, Figma. What a design conference asks of a speaker; follow a framework and leave them with something to think about.

• Record presentations in Keynote on Mac, Apple Support. The recorder and the export are inside Keynote; choose Slideshow Recording as the source and 1080p.

• Record your presentation and Save a presentation as a video, Microsoft Support. PowerPoint records the camera bubble and the voice per slide, then exports the MP4.

• Use slides recording in Google Slides, Google. The built-in recorder and its two limits, the account type and the thirty minutes.

• Cap, open source. The recorder: free, local, no time limit, camera floating or split.

• Tella for Education. If you want a second app later: six months of Pro free on a school email.

• Record a presentation with Loom, Atlassian. Screen + Cam is the bubble described above; the free tier caps a recording at five minutes, so it is for the rehearsal, not the take.

• Recording audio for business video and How to reduce echo in your video, Wistia. Where the 5 to 8 cm and the soft-room rules come from, with pictures.

• Five tips to record professional-quality voice over at home, iZotope. Mic placement and room choice from a company that makes the repair tools, arguing you should not need them.

• How to look more professional on video calls, Elgato. Eye level, front light, distance from the lens. They sell the gear; the advice holds without buying it.

• 13 ways designers screw up client presentations, Mike Monteiro, the talk, and the essay. Stand up, do not read the slide, explain every decision. Written for a room; every point survives the recording.

• Recorded design walkthroughs, The Designer's Field Guide. Why a designer records the walkthrough even when a meeting is possible: saying it once out loud fixes the work before anyone sees it.