demo_video_production v1.0.0

name: "demo_video_production" description: "Plan, record, edit, and publish compelling demo videos for agent projects, launches, and demo nights. Use when producing a product demo video, launch trailer, demo-night entry, or short-form cut — covers the 5-beat script structure, screen-capture settings, and tested ffmpeg edit pipelines."

Demo Video Production

Purpose

Turn a working project into a video that makes people care. Demo videos win launches and demo nights because they show the thing working, live, before explaining anything. This skill covers the full pipeline: structure → script → record → edit (ffmpeg) → format per platform → publish checklist.

Workflow

1. Structure: the 5-beat demo

Every demo video follows five beats, in order:

1. Hook (first 5 seconds). The product in action, full-screen, no talking head. Say the most surprising thing first.
2. Problem. One or two sentences on the pain. Make the viewer feel it.
3. Demo. The live thing working. This is 50-70% of the runtime. No slides here — only the product.
4. Payoff. What changes because this exists. One concrete before/after.
5. CTA. Where to go next. One link, said out loud and shown on screen.

Rule of thumb: if the demo can fail live, show the attempt anyway — a real attempt that wobbles beats a narrated slide deck every time.

2. Script: write to be spoken

• Write full spoken sentences, not bullet points you will ad-lib from. Read-aloud pace is roughly 130 words per minute; budget a 3-minute demo night slot at ~390 spoken words including pauses.
• Mark demo beats in the script: [LIVE: click Play, start game] so the edit has cue points.
• Rehearse once out loud before recording. It catches tongue-twisters and reveals where the demo is boring.

3. Record: capture settings

Screen-capture baseline (OBS or ffmpeg x11grab):

• 1920x1080 at 30fps for the 16:9 master. Record the region of interest, not the whole desktop — crop out notifications and bookmarks.
• Capture audio separately if you can (mic on its own track). Kill fans and notifications before the take; re-record the take rather than repairing noisy audio.
• Leave 2 seconds of silence at the start and end of every take. It gives the edit room to breathe.

4. Edit: assemble in ffmpeg

Trim dead air, join the best takes, normalize the voice, add a title card. All tested commands live in references/ffmpeg-recipes.md — they were verified on ffmpeg 8.1.2 (2026-09-17) and must be re-verified with a dry run on a sample clip before the real edit.

5. Format per platform

• 16:9 master: 1920x1080, H.264 + AAC, for YouTube and X.
• 9:16 short-form cut: 1080x1920, for Shorts/Reels/TikTok. Reframe by center-cropping the region of interest (don't just shrink the 16:9 — text becomes unreadable). Add burned-in captions or large text overlays; most short-form is watched muted.
• Platform facts (verified via YouTube Shorts guides, updated Aug 2026; see references/platform-specs.md): Shorts can run up to 3 minutes since October 15, 2024 (previously 60 seconds). 1080x1920 fills mobile screens; export H.264/AAC in MP4 with -movflags +faststart so playback starts before the download finishes.

6. Publish checklist

• Title: product name + what it does, under 60 characters so it isn't truncated.
• Description: one-sentence pitch, the link, then two lines of context. Tags optional, chapters for anything over 2 minutes.
• Thumbnail: one frame pulled from the edited video (see recipes) + 3-5 words max, tested readable at 120px wide.
• Post the short-form cut natively on each platform — never as a link to the long video.

Output Contract

Each production delivers: the spoken script with demo cue marks, raw takes, the edited 16:9 master, a 9:16 short-form cut, and a title + description + thumbnail draft. Nothing is "done" until the master plays start-to-finish with no dead air and the audio is normalized.

Operating Rules

1. The thing working, first. Lead with the live product. Slides and architecture come after the hook, never before it.
2. Never fake what you can't show. A real attempt that wobbles is credible; a mocked-up success is not.
3. Audio carries the video. Normalize the voice to -16 LUFS and kill room noise before touching the picture.
4. Short-form gets captions burned in. If there's no text on screen, muted viewers scroll past.
5. One link per CTA. Every extra link halves the chance anyone clicks any of them.
6. Test every render command on a sample clip first. Never run the real edit on untested filter chains.