Record the presentation you keep giving: script length, one take, and what stays live

Giving the same overview live for the fourth time this month costs you an hour and the other side a calendar slot, and whoever missed the slot gets a forwarded deck without your voice. Record it once instead: write out what you say to camera, record slides, camera and demo in one take, trim both ends and send the link. An async presentation is a recorded talk sent with a watch-by date and followed by a short live slot for questions.

Send a recording when the content stays the same from one audience to the next, such as the product walkthrough; present live when you still need to hear the other side or need an agreement. The same line decides which internal meetings can go async.

We think a recorded overview is a fair answer even before the first call when a prospect writes "just send me something first", because that prospect has just told you how they want to buy. For the deck-only case, Microsoft's documentation shows how PowerPoint records slide by slide with your notes as a teleprompter.

A recorded presentation should cover one subject in about five to seven minutes, and its script should hold only the minutes you talk without a demo on screen. The six-minute ceiling Guo, Kim and Rubin found on edX was measured on students, so treat it as a rule of thumb. If overview, security answers and implementation plan would run to 20 minutes, record three videos and send each person the one that fits.

We plan with 130 words a minute for English read aloud calmly; that is our assumption, and your rate may differ. To measure it, read the first 200 words of your script aloud at customer pace, time it, and divide 200 by the minutes.

A seven-minute product presentation with about 2 minutes of live demo leaves 5 scripted minutes: 5 × 130 is about 650 words. A draft of 1,300 words will run long or make you rush.

You switch the source while the recording runs and read the camera parts off the teleprompter, both in the free Capme recorder and in Capme Meetings. Put the camera at eye level, face a window or lamp, and use a headset if the room echoes. The seven-minute example, in Chrome on a desktop (labels as of October 2026):

On Free, Save to device gives you a file to share through your own drive; from Solo, Save to cloud puts up to 50 videos in EU hosting behind an unlisted link and removes the copy in your browser. A file does not tell you who watched, and a Solo link shows how often it was opened, not by whom, so ask in the email which part the prospect wants to discuss. Capme Meetings, the meeting platform behind the recorder, shows the organiser, per person by default, who on the audience list has watched 75% of a topic, on Team and above (what admins see); a customer outside your company's domain is on that list only once an admin adds them. Viewers are free; only speakers are billed.

In Germany, a colleague who co-presents in a recording you send to customers has to consent first, which a slide deck never required. § 22 of the Art Copyright Act (KUG) says that "portraits may only be distributed or publicly displayed with the consent of the person depicted" (translated), and the Federal Labour Court required that consent in writing from employees for publication (8 AZR 1010/13, 11 December 2014). The guide to employee video consent covers the form; tracking who watched an internal version is a works council question. This describes the law and is not legal advice.

Once the recording is out, the live meeting only covers questions, so book 30 minutes after the watch-by date instead of the usual hour. Capme does not run the live slot; book it in the call tool you already use. The video has no buttons or booking links, so the email carries the next step and the slot.

Your contact may forward the email to colleagues you have never met, so nothing in it refers back to your last call. Some people will not have watched by the slot: open with a one-minute recap of the main point and keep the link in the invite.

The script for a recorded presentation opens on camera with the reason to keep watching, moves to slides or the product for the substance, and ends on camera with one next step.

Write the camera parts out in full and the demo as cue lines: a sentence read aloud while you click through a product sounds stiff. Write for the ear: short sentences, numbers rounded the way you would say them, and the name of the thing instead of "this" or "it" after a screen switch, since the viewer has just looked away from you. Read the script aloud twice and rewrite every sentence you trip over. If you lose the thread mid-take, stop for two seconds, go back to the start of the sentence and carry on, because the middle cannot be cut later.

Before the take, put the deck in presentation mode in its own window, log into a demo account with clean sample data and close chats, because everything on screen goes to the customer. As with onboarding videos and all-hands updates, re-record when the product or your offer changes, and only then, because a take of last quarter's interface does more harm than a live walkthrough would have.