Video editing tasks

General overview

We need volunteer video editors to speed up the process of turning raw video recordings of BP conference sessions into video files that can be uploaded to BP Video Library.

In exchange of your work you will receive BP credits that you can use towards paying for a future BP event.

How your work fits in the video production process

Creating presentable videos from raw recording involves a 3-step process:

Step 1: Recording the presentation from Zoom. As the admin of a Zoom event, Csaba has access to all recorded material of BP20 Online. What he sees as an admin is quite different from what attendees saw during re-runs. In the admin view the screen consists of 3 parts: the shared screen takes up about 2/3 of the width, the speaker is seen in the top right corner, while an automatic audio transcript is seen in the lower right corner.

Csaba records all the sessions in this admin view from Zoom, and makes these available on BP’s Google Drive.

Step 2: The actual editing process — this is what you will be doing. You’ll need to download and open the recording file in a software called Camtasia (more about this further below). You’ll need to create an empty project, import the recording file into the project and add it to a ‘track’.

The editing process involves cutting out unnecessary parts from the recording. More about this below.

Once you’re done, you save the project, and upload the project file into Google Drive.

Step 3: Csaba opens the edited project, adds the intro and outro, as well as a few captions, then exports the video into mp4 format. This mp4 video file is then uploaded to BP’s Vimeo channel (i.e. ‘BP Video Library’).

How much time does it take to edit a single recording? How will I be compensated?

Depending on the length and the speaker’s quality of speech, a typical 55′ recording takes about 2-3 hours to edit (excluding file transfer times).

For each hour of editing you’ll receive a 20€ BP credit that you can use towards any future BP event.

If you volunteer, please take on at least 2 presentations, these should take 4-5 hours of editing. If you successfully edit at least 4 sessions, you’ll also receive a 1-year access to BP Video Library.

Timing and schedule

Ideally you’d be done with the editing by 16 July. There are about 28 sessions left to be edited, about half of these are 1-hour sessions, the other half is 30′ each.

To be honest, I’d like to upload all final versions to Vimeo by 19 July, before going on holiday.

For starters there are 12 raw recordings on Google Drive, I plan to upload all of them by 9 July, but you can start working on the available ones from now.

How to use Camtasia

Camtasia is a great video editing software that I started using a couple of weeks ago. The good thing is the trial version is valid for 30 days, and you can save the files without any watermark. (But in the trial version a watermark is added to .mp4 file exports.)

Step 1: Download and install Camtasia from Techsmith.com. The software is available both for Windows and Mac. I’m not sure if the files produced are interchangeable, so I’d like to restrict this process to Windows users.

Step 2. Download the recording file from BP’s Google Drive folder and save it on your computer. The files are marked as BP20 nn Name_raw. Make sure you also mark the file as ‘yours’ on a Google Spreadsheet. (Links to GD will be sent by email.)

Step 3. Open a new blank project by clicking on New project under the File menu (or by pressing Ctrl + N).

Step 4. Add the recording file by clicking on the green Import media button, and selecting the file from your computer’s hard drive. A thumbnail will appear in the ‘Media Bin’ area. Pull down the file to the editing area at the bottom on the screen to Track 1.

Step 5. The playhead is a light blue 5-pointed shape above the tracks. Once you start playing the video, you’ll see that the playhead is flanked by a green and a red marker on either side. When you play the video, this playhead moves ahead. You can also ‘zoom in’ and ‘zoom out’ with a slider to adjust the amount of time shown at any one time. For editing it’s advised to use a value near the maximum (to the right), so you can see waveforms for individual syllables spoken.

Step 6. The first couple of minutes in each raw recording are redundant — this is when I adjusted the display width of the shared slides. Please cut out this unnecessary part. Most speakers start with a phrase like ‘Welcome everyone’ or ‘Welcome to my session’ or ‘Hello everybody’– delete anything before this.

Step 7. Also cut out unnecessary filling syllables or when the speaker is looking for words, such as ‘eerm’, ‘how do you say’, ‘so, and…’, etc. The idea is to create a video that is smooth, without any unnecessary parts. If you encounter long silences, please cut those out as well.

Another typical scenario is when the speaker corrects herself: please cut out the incorrect words or syllables and leave only the correct speech. I noticed this happens more often during the Q&A time: speakers practiced their presentations many times, but during Q&A they have to formulate sentences immediately, resulting in more short sections that need to be cut out.

Do NOT cut out any sections where the speaker is silent but something is happening on the shared screen.

Usually the last few minutes of each recordings are also redundant. Please cut out any unnecessary sentences such as ‘Can you repeat this question’ or ‘Please stop sharing your screen’ or similar. Make sure the last bit belongs to the speaker, not the webinar host. When the speaker says good-bye, that’s the ideal time to stop the video, so cut everything after this.

Step 8. Once you identified a section to cut (most frequently one or more eerm’s), pull the green marker to the left or the red marker to the right. By doing so you’re selecting the section to be cut out (usually one or a few waveforms). Cut out the selection by Ctrl+X or by clicking on the Scissors icon.

Step 9. Move back the playhead a little and click on the large Play button again to check if the video flows smoothly and you indeed cut out the unnecessary part and left the necessary ones in. If you made a mistake, you can of course press Ctrl+Z to undo your last cut.

Step 10. Once you’re done with editing the file, press Save as… from the File menu, and save the project file, using the file name convention BP20 nn Name.tscproj (the file name extension is given automatically). This is a much smaller file than the recording the itself, as the project file includes only the list of edits, not the media file. Upload this media file in the same Google Drive folder (you’ll receive the link in an email).

Step 11. Mark the completion of the session on the spreadsheet in the same folder, also marking how much time you spent on it. (e.g. 2:40).

I reckon the whole process should take 2.5-3 hours for a 1-hour recording, largely depending on the speaker. So far I noticed that at one extreme I had to cut up to 100 sections from a 1-hour session, while at the other extreme it was less than 10.

(Installation and file download times do not count towards BP credits only the amount of time you spend on editing itself. Don’t worry, the software is really easy to learn.)

So how to start if interested?

Please send me an email to info at bpconf dot com, with the subject line ‘Video editing’. You’ll receive the link to the Google Drive folder, and off you go.