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Make sure you are on the tab “To my computer”, and not “To the service”, and click Record.
The counter starts counting, and your options are “Pause” and “Stop”. You are now recording the meeting, and the files are going to your Hard Drive. Specifically they are going to My Documents / My Meetings (on my laptop, in Windows XP, that is Documents and Settings / Don Singleton / My Documents / My Meetings, and the files from the first Live Meeting Training went to folder Mar 02 21.00 [Live Meeting Training]. That folder contains:
but don’t worry about all of those subfolders. I have not needed to go into them.
When the meeting is over open the “Recording” menu again and press “Stop”. You will get:
If you want to save the recording, and I would assume you do, make sure the radio button for save is selected, and press “OK”. See that was not hard. You have now created 538 files in 14 folders, totaling 56.3 Mb. But you will not have to deal with individual files. If you look at your SysTray you will see
and then
Shortly after that you will see
You can now shut it down. If you just click on it you will see
You can close the Recording Manager out of your SysTray, unless you want to watch the recording right now, because whenever you do want to watch a recording you can run it, and it will show:
And if you click an entry it will bring it up in your browser:
But I doubt you made a recording just so you could watch it on your Hard Drive. You probably want to put it on your website so that members can watch it later. But do you have to put all 538 files in 14 folders, totaling 56.3 Mb, on your website? No, and even if you did, I am not sure how people could get it to work.
Microsoft has a “Recording Converter for Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2007” (http://snipurl.com/de8kq) tool to convert recorded meetings in High Fidelity Presentation (HFP) format into single movie files.
In the first box you select the recording you want to convert, and in the second box select the folder you want to put the file in. By default it will choose to name it the same as the recording, i.e. Mar 02 21.00 [Live Meeting Training].wmv, but if you want to change the file name you can. You can select the screen resolution. You can select “Run conversion in low priority”, and I don’t know how long that takes, because I let it go full bore, and for about an hour I was running at or near 100% CPU, and other things were verrrry sloooow.
At least you can tell how long it takes
I recorded at 1024x768, so initially I tried that, but the .WMV file was 461 meg. I tried it as 800x600, and it was 334 meg. Still way too long for someone to watch (it took over 30 minutes before it would start playing).
Fortunately I found a solution. Microsoft has a Windows Media Encoder 9 (http://snipurl.com/de9ag) which will process .WMV files and convert them for different ways to distribute your content?
As indicated by the “<<<” I selected “Web Server (progressive download)”.
It lets me assign the following:
And then it asks “How do you want to encode your audio and video?” There are a number of options. See the large table below.
The more you try to lower the file size, to permit a faster download, the more quality suffers. If you go to http://snipurl.com/dea0i (also accessable from the March 3 news item on apcug.net, you will see:
Windows Media Encoder 9 is not the only video encoding and compression tool you can use. It is just the only free one I have found.
Sorenson Media sells Sorenson Squeeze 5 (http://snipurl.com/e21v6), and there may well be many others. If you find a video encoding and compression program that works well for you, let me know, and I will mention it in a future issue of APCUG Reports.
Before you even use a video encoding and compression tool, you may want to edit your .WMV file to remove pauses, flubs, etc. There are a number of products out there that can do that, many by APCUG Sponsors. I have not used any of them. I hope to get several and try them for a review in the July issue; if you have used one successfully let me know, and I will include it, and your experiences, in that article.