Creating an App Promo Video with Keynote

Only basic video editing skills required!


Jul 27, 2020 · 2 min read

Introduction

Even though promo video is not required for Google Play Store listing, it is highly recommended. Especially for games.

Having a promo video can lead to more people discovering, understanding, and installing your app.

Recently, I created a promo video for my health journal app. It took me one day and required only basic video editing skills. This is the end result:

How-to

Here are the steps that I went through.

1. Choose a Device Frame

The device frame is an image that will wrap the video.

For my promo video, I used a Pixel 3 Device Frame from https://facebook.design/devices.

2. Record App Interaction Video

I recorded the video with Android Studio Logcat.

To get a clean status bar, enabling the System UI Demo Mode through Developer Options did the trick.

The video was recorded on a Pixel 3 Emulator.

It couldn't be saved as .mp4, so I saved it as .webm and used this online tool to convert to .mp4

My recording strategy was to record several shorter videos and then use QuickTime Player to merge/split/trim recorded sections into one video for the presentation.

3. Create a Presentation

I used Keynote to create a slideshow presentation that can be exported as a video.

Keynote promo video screenshot

I got this idea thanks to Christoph's blog post.

Keynote features that I used to create the first slide:

  • Triangle shapes: Insert → Shape → Triangle
  • Y-axis positioning of elements (video, device frame, triangles, etc.): Right Click → Send to Back
  • Scale Up animation of device frame/video: Animate → Build In → Add an Effect → Scale
  • Magic Move animation for slide transitions: Animate → Add an Effect → Magic Move: By Object, Start Transition Automatically

For the next slides, I would always just duplicate the previous and adjust text, device position, slide transition delay, etc.

I also changed the presentation type to Self-Playing Document → Presentation Type → Self-Playing and set Delay: Builds to 0,0s. This enabled each slide to fully control its transition delay and sync itself to the video.

4. Add an Audio Track

I used the YouTube Audio Library to find a track that doesn't require attribution. Then I just added it to Keynote Document → Audio → +. To make sure that audio won't distract the viewer from the video, I used the Audio Volume SeekBar control to reduce the volume.

5. Export the Video

With slides and audio done, the last step was to save the presentation as a video File → Export To → Movie... and upload it to YouTube.

Conclusion

Creating a promo video was easier than I expected. I used Keynote as the main tool but my guess is that Microsoft PowerPoint or Google Slides could produce a similar result. The main requirement from the tool would be that it can export the presentation as a video.

Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions or comments.