Like many entrepreneurs during the COVID-19 disruption, you may have been doing Facebook Live, YouTube Live, and Zoom sessions instead of doing presentations at meetings and conferences.

And sometimes you have been absolutely brilliant whether you have a few or hundreds catch your presentation.

You can capture and repurpose your genius with the strategies I describe in this article. I will give you ideas and tips for doing it yourself.

I am also available to help with the process if this is not your dream activity!

You can skip over the techy stuff to the section called Done For You Special Offer.

Repurposing Your Golden Content

I am suggesting that you capture the video, transcribe the audio, edit the transcript, and create a ‘swipe file’ of content for reuse and repurposing as part of your Marketing Wheel and product development.

Here are some places to use your Golden Content:

  • Blog Posts
  • Social Media Posts
  • Newsletters
  • Training Sessions
  • Direct Marketing
  • Podcasts
  • Books
  • Magazine Articles
  • Membership Content
  • Online Courses
  • Content Marketing
  • Radio Ads
  • Use Your Imagination …

Capturing the Video

There was a time in the recent past when you could download High Definition video from Facebook live or use a utility like 4K Downloader to extract HD video from Facebook and YouTube.

However, something changed with Facebook and that no longer works. It seems we can only download low quality Standard Definition (SD) files, taking us back to the days of VHS tapes!

I recently spent a few days exploring options to get around this.

One very promising free option was to use QuickTime to capture the screen.

Here are the basic steps. You may need to track down some YouTube demos for the finer points.

Here is the option for capturing the screen in QuickTime:

Select the New Screen Recording

Select the input driver for recording the system audio:

Select Sound

The challenge is that your Mac does not have an option to record the system sound.

You will need a third party driver to direct the system sound to a mic input. We are using iShowYou. There are alternatives and most screen capture utilities come with their own.

Configure the sound output to send the sound to your speakers AND the recording input.

The usual behaviour of your computer is to send the sound you your speakers of headphones and the sound will not be recorded with the video.

If you send to the iShowYou driver, you won’t hear the video.

You can get around this by configuring an Multi-Output Device that is an aggregate of a driver like iShowYou and your normal sound output device.

Select Multi-Output Device

This will take a little research to figure out.

Click here for the video where I learned this trick.

Select the Screen Area

Select are to record.
Select the area and Press Start Recording

This was free and worked perfectly for me the first time.

However, for some reason the images in the video would get stuck after a few minutes.

And QuickTime was not able to save the video.

This may be a quick with my system.

I suggest that if you are on a budget and have the resources to configure the sound (if not you, then a technically savvy child or friend), I would try this first. Before moving on to paid and open-source programs.

Using a Third-Party Screen Capture Program

Since the nifty QuickTime solution stopped working, I tried a number of free and paid programs.

Most has a similar approach as the QuickTime solution above.

Most automatically installed the drivers to capture the system sound.

Some were very awkward, especially the Open Source programs.

A few had poor results such as jerky video.

I eventually narrowed it down to Camtasia, ScreenFlow, Snagit, and Movavi Screen Recorder.

I opted for Movani Screen Recorder because it was simple and reasonably priced. One of the others may be good for you if you plan to do more than what I was trying to do.

Click Here for a Review for Free and Paid Options

Capturing Video from YouTube Live

If the video from YouTube Live is on your YouTube account, you can download an HD file through your YouTube Studio account.

Also utilities like 4K Downloader may work for you on YouTube.

Avoiding the Need for Screen Recording with Ecamm Live

Moving forward, you can vastly improve the quality and production value of your live streams by using a program like Ecamm Live for Mac.

The video at the top of this article was created with Ecamm Live, then edited with FinalCut Pro.

ECamm Live can record up to 4K video on your computer as you are broadcasting to a live stream.

You can simply load the local file into a video editor a go from there.

Similar programs exits for Windows.

Transcribing the Audio

The next step is transcribing the audio.

At one time this was a very expensive proposition.

And if you have ever tried doing it yourself by hand, you will appreciate how difficult and time-consuming this could be.

Some of the options include:

  • Paying a service to do a transcription and edit.
  • Using a service to do a machine translation then edit yourself.
  • Hire someone to look after some or all of that.

Here is what I do for myself and for clients:

  • Use Simon Says to do a machine translation.
    The service is reasonably priced, does a decent job, and has a good interface for listening to the recording and editing the text.
  • Edit the transcript to suit the purpose. Sometimes I just want to document the video so that I can quickly find content for future projects. The machine translation is close enough for that.

Preparing the Audio File for Transcription

While it is possible to simply upload the captured video to the transcription service I will generally do a quick edit on the video first and export the audio for uploading.

I use FinalCut Pro, but Quicktime and most paid and free video editors will work.

Here is my process:

  • Trim the video front and back to remove dead air and unusable video. No point in spending time and money on unusable video.
  • Adjust the sound levels. Final Cut Pro has a Loudness button and a quick slider to bring the overall level of the sound to be optimal. You can use equalization (EQ) to remove hiss and other noises.
  • Edit out stumbles and dumb things you or your subjects may have said that you can find easily. Again, no point in paying to document mistakes.
  • I leave finer editing like color correcting and titling for later.
  • Exporting the audio with the video in its rough shape will provide a transcript with matching time-codes.
  • Export the audio. Most of the standard formats like mp3 will work, so often the default export format will work with little fuss.

Uploading the Audio

Services like Simon Says provide various ways to upload the audio.

The simplest way is to upload the audio file from your computer.

You can also select the file from cloud services such as Google Drive and Dropbox.

I usually create a project folder for the video, audio, and transcripts in Google Drive. So I will upload the audio file to the project folder and select from there.

Done For You Special Offer

  1. Review your online content and goals to choose the best live streams to capture and transcribe.
  2. Capture the selected live stream video clips.
  3. Do a preliminary video edit.
  4. Optimize the audio.
  5. Export the audio.
  6. Upload the audio for transcription.
  7. Hand edit the machine transcription.
  8. Download the edited transcription.
  9. Create a report with suggested golden content to repurpose, including suggested headlines and locations.
  10. Upload the video, audio, transcript, and suggestions to a project area on Google Drive.

The complete rate is $8 USD per minute of video captured from your live stream.

We can start with a free discovery call and a small pilot project. A ten to twenty-minute live stream is a good place to start.

Please use the form below to request a free discovery session. Include your goals and links to some of your online videos to help me get a sense of what you are doing.

— Greg Dixon