The Product Launch Video Guide: What to Make and When

Most teams buy one launch video. They publish it on launch morning, watch attention spike and evaporate inside a day, and conclude that launch video does not work very well.

The video was fine. The problem is that a launch is a curve, not a moment, and one asset can only serve one point on it. The two weeks before the date need something that withholds. Launch morning needs something that explains and converts. The fortnight after needs proof and detail for the people who missed the announcement. Here is how to plan for all three without commissioning three separate productions.

The three assets that actually matter

1. The teaser

Six to ten seconds, no explanation, no feature list. Its only job is to make the launch feel imminent and give your audience something to react to while the countdown runs. The most useful property of a good teaser is what it refuses to show — a partial UI, a shape moving behind glass, one number appearing.

The critical rule: cut the teaser from the hero film, not separately. If the teaser uses shots the hero film has not shown yet, the reveal on launch day is an actual payoff, because the audience recognises frames they have been looking at for a week. Teasers commissioned as their own little project never land that way — they read as a different campaign.

Build the date and any countdown numerals on editable text layers. Launch dates slip. When yours does, that should be a text change and a re-export, not a new production.

2. The hero launch film

Thirty to sixty seconds, and it has to work in at least four places at once: your site hero, the launch post, the directory or app store gallery, and the press kit. That constraint drives every decision in it.

• Open on the product, not a logo sting. Nobody has granted you three seconds of goodwill for branding.
• Build it silent-first. Most of the places it runs autoplay muted. Captions belong in the frame composition, not slapped on afterwards.
• Make the first ten seconds stand alone. Assume that is all anyone watches, and make sure someone who stops there still knows what shipped.
• Layer sound design and voiceover for the minority who unmute — as an enhancement, never as the carrier of essential information.

3. The post-launch cutdowns

Launch week is longer than launch day. Three or four feature-specific clips, vertical versions, and a couple of "how it actually works" pieces give you something to publish on days two through ten, when the initial wave has passed but inbound attention is still elevated.

These are also cheap, because they come out of footage and animation you have already paid to produce. Cutting them at the same time as the hero film costs a fraction of coming back three weeks later to reopen a project.

The timeline, worked backwards

Launch day is day zero. Count backwards from it, not forwards from today.

T-30: lock the brief and the calendar. Not the script — the calendar. What date does the embargo lift, when do emails send, when does the directory listing go live, when does the press kit need to be in a journalist's inbox? Every asset gets pinned to one of those dates. Anything that cannot be pinned to a date is not a launch asset; it is a nice-to-have.

T-21: script the teaser and the hero film together. In one pass, in one document. This is the only way to decide what the teaser withholds and what the hero pays off. Scripting them separately is how you end up with a teaser that shows the same shot as the film.

T-18: styleframes approved. Type, colour, motion language, and how your UI gets treated, agreed on stills. Approving a look on a still costs an hour. Changing it after the animation is rigged costs days. Our production process breaks down which gate each of these approvals sits behind.

T-14: teaser live. This is the deadline people miss most often, because they think of the teaser as a smaller version of the launch video and therefore something to make afterwards. The teaser has to exist while the countdown is running, which means it ships two weeks before the thing it is teasing.

T-7: countdown variants and hero film locked. Final approvals done a full week early. Launch week should be a distribution problem, not a production problem.

T-0: launch. Nothing is being rendered today.

T+2 to T+10: cutdowns drip out. Already produced, already scheduled.

Realistically: three to four weeks between kickoff and launch day is comfortable. Our fixed-price packages run 3 to 14 days for the whole kit — the Growth Bundle is a 10-day turnaround and is the first tier that includes a dedicated countdown/hype launch video — so the practical floor is around two weeks if your brief, brand kit, and product access are ready on day one. Starting earlier mostly buys a calmer approval window; the production itself does not get faster with more notice.

Capture everything before the UI freezes

This is the part teams regret. In the last fortnight before a launch your interface is changing daily, and the day you need footage of it is the day somebody has just shipped a new nav.

Capture early and capture more than you need:

• Clean screen recordings at 1080p or higher, on a device with a stable frame rate, with notifications off and a demo account whose data looks plausible. Placeholder emails like test@test.com and a user called "asdf" will show up at full size in your hero film.
• Every state, not just the happy path. Empty states, loading states, success confirmations, the settings screen nobody thinks to record. The edit will want a shot you did not plan for.
• Slow, deliberate cursor movement. Real usage is jittery and unusable. Move once, pause, click, pause.
• The same journey recorded three times, so the edit has options without needing you to re-record during approval week.
• Design source, not screenshots. A Figma file of the key screens lets a motion team rebuild the interface at any resolution. A compressed screenshot pulled from a deck does not.

What you need live on day one

A launch that has the video but not the formats is still a launch that scrambles. Everything below should be in one folder, organised by publish date, before launch week starts:

• 16:9 — site hero, YouTube, the press kit, most directory galleries.
• 9:16 — vertical for Reels, Shorts, TikTok, and Stories. Reframed, with text and UI repositioned for the vertical safe area, not centre-cropped from the landscape master.
• 1:1 and 4:5 — feed placements, where 4:5 buys noticeably more vertical screen real estate than square.
• App store or directory cut — these have their own length limits, dimensions, and autoplay behaviour, and most show the video muted with the first frame doing the work of a thumbnail. Choose that frame deliberately.
• Press kit stills — poster frames at 1280×720, 1200×630 social cards, and product stills at the sizes journalists and directory editors actually request. Sending a link to a YouTube page and hoping someone screenshots it is not a press kit.
• Caption files — burned-in captions for the muted feed, plus separate .srt and .vtt sidecars so the dialogue is indexable and accessible.
• A WebM or looping cut if the film doubles as a site background.

Every one of those is a standard deliverable rather than an add-on in our product launch video service, and the same reframing logic applies to the social cutdowns in a social media kit.

After the launch

The strongest cut from a launch kit usually has a second life as an evergreen promo, once the date-specific framing is removed. That is a small edit, and it is worth budgeting for: a launch video retires the moment the launch is old news, but a product promo keeps running.

If what you are actually launching is a SaaS product where the hard part is getting a trial user to their first useful action, pair the launch kit with an onboarding explainer — the two do different jobs, and our post on why SaaS companies need explainer videos covers the distinction. And if you are still working out what any of this should cost, we published what actually drives explainer video pricing.