Recording Converter to WMV Format

Transcription

1 Recording Converter to WMV Format Now let s assume you have recorded your meeting and you want to play people to be able to play it back. This could be very useful to review a meeting, make sure minutes are accurate (or as a way of providing minutes), or allowing people who could not attend to at least hear and see what transpired. If you are going to record the meeting you will have to affirmatively press the record button while in the meeting. By default, the meeting does not record. It will only record from the moment you press the record button. Anything occurring before that button is pressed is not recorded. Recording are stored on the leader s local hard drive in a proprietary format. In order to make them viewable to everyone, even those without the Live Meeting client installed, the recording needs to be converted (called transcoding) to a more generic format. Microsoft provides just such a tool that will convert it to WMV format. Depending on your streaming capabilities that may be sufficient. However, at Vanderbilt, MP4 is the preferred format and there are a variety of freeware and shareware tools that will convert WMV to MP4. In this document we are only going to demonstrate how to convert to WMV using Microsoft s conversion tool. It is up to you to get it to MP4 once it is in WMV format. By default, meeting videos are stored in the Documents (or My documents in XP) folder called My Meetings. 1

2 If you click on it you will see a list of all of your meetings. Click the meeting. Now, since you ALREADY have Live Meeting installed you can simply play back the meeting by clicking the ReplayMeeting.html file. NOTE: it will play back the video as well as the screens and applications shared. It will not play back questions and answers that are type text. It does play back the video but I have noticed on some recordings the video looks scrambled. 2

3 Perhaps you want to give people JUST the audio. Maybe hearing what transpired is as important as seeing it and you want to be able to audio podcast the meeting. People can then play it on their mp3 players while they are jogging through the park. To get just the audio click on the Audio folder above. The audio is already stored as a video less WMV media file. Run it through a transcoder like Camtasia, or Format Factory to strip off the blank video and save the audio as an MP3 file. That MP3 can then be distributed in various ways for the users to get and add to their MP3 players. But what if you want more than just the audio, you want to be able to have people view the entire meeting, video, desktop, Powerpoints, and all, as well as hear all the speakers. You can do that but you need to make some decisions. The first decision you need to make is what screen size do you want your video to be created in. At this time I recommend that you convert the meeting to 800x600 screen resolution. This will allow those with screens set to 1024x768 (the next step up) to view the entire presentation without using scroll bars to go up, down, right or left. In several years as screen resolutions get finer, you will then be able to record at 1024x768 or even higher, but as of right now, July 2010, I strongly recommend converting to 800x600. Unfortunately that will make your screen captures (Powerpoint slides or shared applications) appear even smaller IF you also want to show the video of the speaker. Which brings us to the second decision you need to make. Do you want (or need) the videos of the actual speakers to appear in the recorded session? By leaving the video out you get two big advantages. First, you have more screen geography to show your shared applications and Powerpoints. This can be very important, for example, if you are showing something in fine detail or showing a complex Excel spreadsheet. If they are converted to 800x600 and you have the video playing as well, the material you want the user to read may be too small to interpret. The second advantage is that the resulting file size will be significantly smaller making it eventually stream more efficiently and using about 20% less disk space on the server you are storing it on. Finally, people may not want their images out for others to see beyond the actual meeting. 3

4 The downside of not having the video, is that adding the video adds some realism to the actual session and allows people to tag comments with actual faces. So, you have to decide. Is adding the video of the speakers worth it or not? Now let s convert our Meeting. Go to Start, Programs, Microsoft Office Live Meeting Clicking on that shows the Recorder Converter choice. Click on that choice. 4

5 c You will see the following screen. You can browse to where the meeting is recorded from and where you want to put it. You can also specify the video dimensions and whether you want the webcam video to show (you can also select the Panorama Video choice if you recorded the session using a Polycom CX5000 panoramic video webcam. If you did not use a Polycom CX5000, then do not select that choice. Click Convert. 5

6 When you click Convert you will see this: 6

7 It can take up to an hour, depending on your processor in your computer, to convert a one hour video to WMV, so, you cannot be in a rush. You will speed the process along a bit if you close all other applications and don t try to run anything while the conversion is taking place. Do this from a freshly booted computer to eliminate slowness due to low memory available caused by memory leaks. Go out for a walk, or get dinner. Some people start these right before they go to bed and it is completed by the time they wake up in the morning. The first time you do this I would recommend converting it with the video to see how it looks to you and whether you like it and need it. If you decide it isn t worth it, change the filename of the resulting WMV file slightly and re convert the original file, only this time with the webcam video box Unchecked. Then compare them. When the video is finished converting you will see this: 7

8 You may click View Converted Recording to view your video or you can look at it by clicking on the resulting file under Documents (My documents in XP) and under My Meetings. Here is where you can go in and change the meeting name to something easier to type and remember, and to differentiate it if you want to re convert it either with or without the webcam recorded. As you can see, I changed the recording s name. I was careful, however, to keep the wmv file extension. 8

9 Once you have the file in the wmv format, like above, you can transcode it again into an MP4 file using any of the commercially available transcoders. Last revised: :JSG 9