TL;DR: Quick one-off demo, full-stack Loom for recording, editing, and distribution. If I'm going to re-use across prospects, record with Screen Studio, edit/record with Descript, distribute through Loom or YouTube.
Quick and disposable video
For one prospect and one call, Loom reigns supreme. It's great for quick recording AND upload / distribution. From the moment you hit "end recording," it generates a public link that you can share with prospects and they can comment on the video as well. Since selling to Atlassian, though, its quality has gone down and cost has gone up.
Reusable and polished video
For higher-quality productions, technical product marketing teams are loving Screen Studio. It's simply the best product UI editing tool with cutting, panning, padding, typing. A utility with a one-time license fee per release version (thank god this model is coming back). And then moving to post-production editing, drop the mp4 into Descript. Its voice to text and text to voice is quite strong, has some slide options, decent recording options, and can publish a link and people can comment on it.
Group convos
Riverside: Best for recording video podcast / conversations. High quality video and audio upload from a group of people chatting/sharing screens (can even stream). Post-production editing tools are just ok, so I usually export out to Descript or something better.
Hardware
- Shure: Most popular entry podcasting USB mic (MOTIV MV7 is what I have). Though, the post-production AI audio functionality (in Loom, Riverside, or Descript) these days does so well with enhancements (noise cancel, audio leveling), that I rarely use this mic and opt for AirPods instead.
- Insta360 Link 2: Solid $200 web cam with HD 4k streaming, auto color/light balancing, panning. Used to use my iPhone plugged into my Mac via Continuity Camera, which has very good video quality, but wasn't practical for daily calls.
Presentation
- Figma Slides: Good multimedia support. Can drop in Figma prototypes and demo them directly. Best design interface (uses Figma native Design features) for slides. Canva a close second.
- Arc: A Chromium fork and has less "chrome," so it's a cleaner demo. I've been back and forth with actually using as my main browser (currently back to Google Chrome).
John Forbes is the founder of Aero and a former sales engineer & product marketer at high-growth software companies. john@aero.ws