Recycling PowerPoints on Zoom | Mandate Donor Committee for Dual Vocational Education and Training DC dVET | 2020

When it comes to sharing knowledge, the Covid-19 lock down has left many international organizations with only one choice: hold online webinars. Those who organize such streaming events know, quite a lot of work goes into the preparation of such an online exchange. It is no surprise then that these webinars are often recorded in order to share them later on.

You could upload your recorded Zoom meeting straight to YouTube. But such videos are not very attractive to watch for 30 minutes.

Zoom videos are hardly ever in full HD quality (1080p), even if you turn on enable HD in the application's settings. For example the face camera on your laptop records in lower resolution. Or the video signal is not streamed in full HD quality. The result is a recorded Zoom video that is pixelated: The face of the presenter is pixelated, the resolution of your PowerPoint presentation is terrible.

Also, your recorded Zoom video doesn't come in your company's corporate design. Your uploaded video doesn't start without an animated logo followed by a good looking title. Rather it starts with the presenter who is still adjusting his or her PowerPoint and searching the right words to start. All these aspects downplay the significance of the message of the video presentation.

No, you don't have to necessarily have serious video equipment in order to create attractive video presentation. It might be enough to edit your recorded zoom session by a professional. Yes, you still end up with a PowerPoint video, but it is a good looking PowerPoint video. People will more likely tune in and listen.

Here below an example how a webinar video can be redesigned for future use. The client created a specific page with all their webinar videos, with the option to download the PowerPoint and additional links to deepen your understanding of the topic.

Don't forget the audience when finalizing videos for future use! How can you make it easier for them to find what they are looking for? For example, adding chapters will help your audience to quickly access key moments. I like to add the time point (minutes:seconds) below the chapter title so that you can scroll right to the right time in the video. But many video platforms support interactive chapters. On YouTube, for example, you create chapters in the description field below your video. Using the " : " you automatically create a time code link. In the image below 0:25 and 12:56 and 18:38 are points letting you jump to the respective chapter.

Text based information has one great advantage to video based information. You can quickly scan through it, by reading each page diagonally, only slowing down at those locations that you find important. You can speed up the presentation video and slow it down when you hear something interesting, but it is still not the same. Scanning text is still quicker.

Luckily the voice recognition algorithms are producing better and better results. On YouTube you can turn on automatic captions for your video. The algorithm will translate the spoken word into text. You can then read through the text and find the moment in the video that you want to watch. This video shows you how to access the transcribed text on YouTube videos. This only works if the video has closed captions or has activated the auto-generated captions feature.