You finish a four-minute walkthrough, watch it back, and your face is parked directly on top of the “Save” button you spent ninety seconds explaining. The recording is otherwise fine. The audio is clean, you hit every beat, and there is nothing to do about it except record the whole thing again. That single decision, made in about two seconds before you tapped record, cost you the take.
Short answer: In face cam overlay recording, put the camera bubble in the corner your app uses least, usually top-left or top-right, and size it to about a quarter of the screen width. DemoScope on iPhone lets you drag the bubble to any corner and pinch to resize before you record. Because DemoScope has no editing tools, that placement is permanent.
The original post, face cam overlay recording: why mobile works better than desktop, argued that a phone is the better capture device for app demos. The most common question that came back was smaller and more practical: where does the bubble actually go?
Placement is a pre-record decision
DemoScope exports MP4 (H.264) straight to your camera roll and has no trimming, cropping, or repositioning after the fact. That means the face cam bubble’s corner, shape, and size are baked into the pixels. Desktop tools often let you nudge an overlay in post. On iPhone, with DemoScope, you decide first or you re-record.
So spend thirty seconds before the take doing this: open the app you’re demoing, walk the exact flow you plan to record, and watch which corners fill up with UI.
Which corner? Walk your own flow first
Here’s the checklist I run before any demo:
- Does the flow involve a keyboard? The keyboard eats the bottom 40% of the screen. Bottom-left and bottom-right bubbles will sit on top of it, and worse, on top of autocomplete suggestions.
- Is there a tab bar? Bottom corners collide with the first and last tab, which are usually the two you tap most.
- What’s in the top-right of your app? Profile avatars, “Done” buttons, and overflow menus live there. If your flow taps that corner, move the bubble.
- Are there sheets or modals? Bottom sheets rise from the bottom edge and will slide under the bubble.
- Portrait or landscape? Landscape shifts everything. Re-check placement per orientation rather than assuming it carries over.
After that, the answer is usually top-left. It’s the quietest corner in most iOS apps: back buttons are small, and the status bar clock is already there so viewers expect that region to be chrome, not content.
My actual recommendation: default to top-left, move to top-right only if your app has a prominent back button or a left-aligned nav title you need visible. The trade-off is that a top-left bubble can overlap the back chevron, so if your demo is a deep navigation flow with lots of backing out, top-right wins.
Shape changes what the bubble covers
DemoScope offers four camera shapes: circle, square, vertical rectangle, and horizontal rectangle. They are not interchangeable, because each one covers a different footprint of your UI.
| Shape | Footprint | Best for | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Circle | Smallest visual weight for its size | Default choice, tutorials, App Store previews | Crops the top of your head if you sit too close |
| Square | Slightly more coverage than a circle | Talking-head intros before the demo starts | Sharp corners read as “a box on my screen” |
| Vertical rectangle | Tall and narrow | Showing gestures, hands, or a product you hold up | Overlaps vertical lists and sidebars |
| Horizontal rectangle | Wide and short | Reaction strips along the top or bottom edge | Spans the full width of tab bars and nav bars |
Circle is the right default for app demos. It reads as a face cam rather than a second video window, and at a given diameter it obscures less screen area than a square.
How big is too big?
Keep the bubble around a quarter of the screen width. Pinch to resize it in DemoScope until it’s big enough that your expression is legible on a phone screen, and no bigger. Two failure modes I hit regularly:
- Too small: on a 6.1-inch display, a tiny bubble makes your face unreadable once the video is downscaled in a feed. Your face cam stops adding anything.
- Too large: the bubble starts stealing attention from the tap you’re narrating, which defeats the point. If you’re using touch indicators, the dot and the bubble should never be in the same corner.
For broader capture setup questions like audio routing and resolution, the ios screen recorder guide: everything you need to know for mobile recording covers the parts that sit upstream of overlay placement.
Placement in External PiP mode
External PiP recording in DemoScope is different, and this catches people out. External PiP activates a system-wide floating face cam window, sends DemoScope to the background, and records across every app on your iPhone using the iOS Broadcast Extension. Your tools in that mode are limited to Camera, PiP Border, and Text on screen. There are no touch indicators and no teleprompter, because iOS does not allow them during a system-level broadcast.
The practical consequence for bubble placement: you are moving the bubble around other people’s apps, not your own. Settings screens, Safari, the Photos app, all with different UI density. Pick the corner that’s quietest across every app in your route, not just the first one.
When to skip the face cam
If you’re recording a bug report for a developer to reproduce, or a flow where the UI is dense edge to edge (a map, a photo editor, a dashboard), drop the face cam and record screen only. A bubble covering the one pixel region that matters is worse than no face at all. Face cam earns its space in tutorials, launch videos, and anything where trust or personality is part of the message.
If you’re still deciding which recorder to use for this at all, the best ios screen recorder options: built-in tools vs third-party apps lays out where the built-in iOS recorder stops being enough, and recording quality settings: how iphone screen recorders compare in 2026 covers what actually affects output fidelity.
Frequently asked questions
Can I move the face cam bubble while recording?
The camera bubble in DemoScope is draggable to any corner, so you can reposition it during a session. But moving it mid-take is visible in the final video, and since DemoScope has no editing features, you cannot clean that up afterward. Decide the corner before you start.
What’s the best corner for a face cam overlay on iPhone?
Top-left is the safest default for most iOS apps, because the bottom corners collide with tab bars, keyboards, and bottom sheets. Switch to top-right if your demo relies on a back button or left-aligned navigation title.
Does the face cam bubble cover the teleprompter?
No. The DemoScope teleprompter is only visible to you and is not recorded, so it does not appear in the exported video. The teleprompter is available in in-app recording mode only, not in External PiP mode.
How much does DemoScope cost?
DemoScope is freemium. The free tier records with a watermark, and DemoScope Pro is a $19.99 one-time purchase that removes the watermark and includes all features. It’s a one-time payment, not a subscription, and requires iOS 14 or later on iPhone or iPad.
Can I change the bubble shape after recording?
No. DemoScope offers circle, square, vertical rectangle, and horizontal rectangle camera shapes, but the shape you choose is recorded into the video file. There is no post-recording editing, so shape and size are locked once you export.
Spending thirty seconds mapping your app’s corners before you record saves you a full re-take, and on mobile that’s the whole workflow: get it right on the first pass because there’s no second pass in an editor. DemoScope is worth a look if that constraint appeals to you rather than annoys you.