Comment by pimterry
2 years ago
Not really! To be honest it's a bit of a hassle and I don't have good tooling or a proper setup. I write a little script, then just record myself manually clicking through it (which is boring, and takes a bunch of tries to do smoothly) and then load it into iMovie and trim it down and speed up any awkward slow bits. It's not a perfect solution at all, but it does the job and I only update it once a year or so.
In a perfect world, I'd kill for a tool where I could define a script (something similar to a Playwright test) and it'd automatically run and record everything, so I could redo the video much more frequently and accurately. I think you probably can do that for a normal web app already (?) but the challenge here is that HTTP Toolkit is launching other apps that also pop up over the top, and so I need to record them all together.
If you're looking for inspiration around this sort of thing, the Android demo video is different and also worth looking at: https://httptoolkit.com/android/
So first off, your gif looks great! I like your sizing and resolution--that's one of the things I was worried about. Video recording is new to me, so I'd love to know what you record with and resolution settings to pick?
I stumbled on this nice blog post on automating these recordings. Maybe a partial solution?
https://martinheinz.dev/blog/94
I was thinking of doing a manual process like yours for a start rather than automating, but hearing your thoughts makes me think I'll try automating sooner.
I see what you mean about the multi-app aspect. I'll have to switch to browser windows for mine as well. Your android approach is nice!
> I'd love to know what you record with and resolution settings to pick?
It's an _extremely_ simple setup. Actual recording is done with Mac's built-in screenshot tool: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208721. It's recorded at an arbitrary window size I eyeballed the first time, that now I probably have to stick to forever (because if they're all the same size, I can reuse parts to avoid re-recording unnecessarily).
All of this is suboptimal (using 1080p would have helped, for starters, since lots of tools work better with standard resolutions) but it doesn't really matter, it just annoys me mildly one day a year and that's it.
IMO: if you're at the start, unless you have a super unique situation, I wouldn't look at automating videos or perfecting the recording setup at all - just ship something barely acceptable and see if it works, and then focus on pain points that actually turn out to be blockers later. Getting a core product into real people's hands and getting real feedback ASAP is more valuable than tweaking the video resolution or anything similar!
Perhaps this recording tool built on top of / integrated with an e2e testing framework could be a revenue-generating side project for an enterprising soul :)