What this is. A pilot of the third format we discussed: real product footage (recorded from mailbridge.app via Playwright), silent, with caption overlays and short branded bookends. No voice, no face cam, no TTS. Total 23 seconds.
What is different from the animated slides
Real UI. The middle 18 seconds are a live scroll of mailbridge.app, recorded via Playwright, not motion graphics.
Captions do the narration. No TTS voice. YouTube viewers see the message, and mobile scrollers on mute still get it.
Bookends only for context. The intro card sets up the problem (Gmail removed the feature). The outro is the CTA. The middle is real.
No voice needed from you. This whole video was produced without you having to record anything.
Pipeline
Playwright scripts the browser: open mailbridge.app, smooth scroll for 10 seconds, scroll back for 5 seconds. Records 1920x1080 WebM.
ffmpeg converts WebM to MP4 (h264).
Remotion loads the MP4 as an <OffthreadVideo> component and layers captions + intro/outro cards on top.
npx remotion render MailBridgePilot outputs the final 23-second MP4 (11 MB).
What to check
Caption timing and readability at mobile size.
Is the mailbridge.app scroll pacing right, or too fast or too slow?
Does the intro card grab attention in the first 2 seconds?
Does the CTA at the end feel earned?
If you like it
I produce 4 more variants per provider (Yahoo, Outlook, DreamHost, Hostinger, AOL). Each records a different section of mailbridge.app or its provider-specific setup guide.
I upload to YouTube as tests. First 2 weeks: measure view retention against the animated set (kept as landing-page loops only, not uploaded).
If retention beats animations by 2x, we standardize this format and I automate the pipeline (one Playwright script per provider variant, run once, upload).
If you do not like it
Kill the format. Skip video entirely for the moment.
Focus capital on backlinks and blog content, where you already have a working template.
Not in this pilot
A mocked Gmail Settings screen showing the removed button (would need one more asset; can add for v2 if you want).
Cross-cuts of the actual MailBridge dashboard UI (would need Google OAuth login through a demo Gmail account; skip until we agree the format works).