Quality tiers

There are three tiers — standard, high and ultra — and the tier decides one thing: how many pixels the browser is recorded at. It changes no step, no camera move, no narration and no timing — the same plan at a higher tier is the same demo, sharper.

Those are the desktop numbers, measured at the 1920 × 1080 viewport a desktop demo is recorded in. A mobile demo multiplies the same tier by the phone's own pixel density — see Desktop and mobile capture — so Standard, High and Ultra mean the same thing in both formats and there is no second ladder to learn.

Which one to pick

• Standard for anything that will be watched in a page, in a doc, in an email, or in a Slack thread. It is 1920 × 1080 and it is what the overwhelming majority of demos want.
• High when the video will be projected, or embedded at full width on a large display, or when the app's own type is small and you want the zoomed beats to stay crisp.
• Ultra when the video is going to be re-cut, cropped or scaled up by somebody else — an agency's edit, a conference reel, a keynote.

Higher tiers cost more time. There are more pixels to encode and to composite, so an Ultra demo takes materially longer than the same demo at Standard.

How the tier is decided, and when

The tier is chosen on the composer, checked once at create time, and then written into the plan. That last part matters:

• A re-render reads the tier from the stored plan. Re-rendering an Ultra demo gives you Ultra again, and asks nothing of any billing provider.
• A re-shoot is charged at today's plan. A refresh buys a new capture, so it is gated when it is created. A workspace whose Pro has lapsed keeps every video it made and cannot spend the paid lever again.
• An automatic re-shoot after a failed capture carries the tier it already paid for. The first capture was gated, ran, and delivered nothing; charging for the replacement would charge twice for one video that did not work.

What a refusal looks like

Asking for High or Ultra without the entitlement is refused at creation with a message naming the upgrade path, not silently downgraded. A demo that quietly came back at a lower resolution than you asked for would be worse than being told no, because you cannot see the difference until you look for it.

The refusal names the workspace, because that is what a plan belongs to. Buying Pro personally does not make a team workspace Pro — see Pro, and what a lapse takes.

Where the tier does not reach

• Imports. An imported file is your file; nothing about it is captured, so it carries the free tier as a formality and no gate applies.
• The look. The backdrop, the framing, the cursor and the captions are decided in the editor and are free on every tier. See The look and the brand kit.
• The format. Recording at a phone viewport is a recording input, not a paid lever.