Recording zoom lectures...
Is this the most efficient workflow?
These days as we flip-flop between in-person and Zoom sessions, the need to be able to share video of our classes with students is increasingly important. With a good number of my Master’s students still in their home countries and not even able to travel into Ireland, time zones can be problematic for everyone to attend classes in real-time, so recordings need to be made available.
My problem:
As far as I know, there’s no way in Zoom to trim bits off your recorded sessions so that they are not saved when you download the MP4 video, but I don’t want to include all the to-ing and fro-ing before the class proper. Yes, I could just start recording at the correct moment, but I’m always afraid I’ll forget to hit the record button, so recording the full sessions automatically seems like a safer bet.
My current solution:
So here’s my current workflow - but if there’s a better one, please share it so we can all benefit from your experience!
1) I download the “Share screen with speaker view” file from Zoom - typically a 2Gb file for a 2 hour online class.
2) I now need to trim off the stuff before the class starts. For this I use a great little free app called Lossless Cut ( https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut/releases ) which loads in the video, let’s you set cut points and then removes these from the video, storing a copy with the cut bits removed - and it does it in about 5 seconds!
3) I still have a file which is well over 1.5Gb, which is too large for me to upload onto my college’s LMS. So stage 3 is to reduce the file-size, which I do using another great free app - Handbrake ( https://handbrake.fr/ ). This outputs the video but works compression magic on it, so my 1.5Gb file typically reduces down by up to 90% in size, depending on the resolution I choose for the output file. The problem is, this stage takes about 30 minutes per 2 hour session on my Macbook Pro, which is OK but I’d love to be able to find a faster solution - any ideas out there?
4) Now I have my trimmed and shrunken video, I upload it into the LMS for my students to access.
So, have I made a rod for my own back here? Is there a better way?
Any ideas out there?
Cheers from the first really frosty morning of 2020 in Dublin, Ireland,
Asst. Professor & Director, MSc Project Management programmes, UCD Smurfit Graduate School of Business
Management consultant - www.houghton.consulting
EPALE Ambassador
Dublin, Ireland
Email : joe.houghton@ucd.ie / joe.houghton@gmail.com
Tel: +353 86 384 3670