Setting up a recording with Zoom

- There are many different ways to remotely record a video podcast. You can use things like Ecamm Skype, Zoom or as you saw earlier, Zencastr. Right now, we're going to take a look at Zoom which is a popular video conferencing service. And depending upon your account, you may have the ability to record. This is generally limited to those with a paid account. And I'm going to take advantage of the Cloud recording option which gives me greater flexibility. This option may run you up to $50 a month so this is more than you need. Be sure to also explore that service like Zencastr. But I know many of you may work with organizations or have already invested in a platform like Zoom So you can check this out. You can also do similar things with tools like Skype using the record feature built in or optional add-ons. So this is just an overview of general things to consider. One of the first things we need to do is check our recording settings. What I need to do is log into my Zoom account. Go ahead and access your account and then go under settings. Choose the recording option. I'm going to record things here independently, recording active speaker, shared screens If we're going to be looking at anything like software applications and recording the speakers separately. Notice here that I'm recording the Gallery view, the Active speaker and the Shared screen. I'll also record some audio only files. It's important that you check the option here to optimize the recording for third party video editor. This'll use a much higher quality Kodak when it records the file making it better overall. All right, that looks good. I'll click Save. Under your meeting settings, do a search for HD and make sure that you turn on the option for Group HD video if it's available. Now you can close the Zoom preferences. Go to your Zoom application and either schedule or launch a new meeting. - [Automated Personal Assistant] Recording in progress. Recording stopped. - I've got mine set to Auto record so let me pause that for a moment. Now, go under your Zoom settings. What you'll want to do is check that you're sending in things correctly. I'm using my USB audio codec which is taking things here from the soundboard directly. You don't have to use this, but I have a USB mixer. That's taking my microphone, a pro quality mic here and running it into the board and converting it to a USB signal that Zoom can see. Similarly, under the Video tab, I am feeding things in via a mixer. Now I can switch here and toggle between different devices. For example, here's my webcam That's attached from Logitech sitting on top of my monitor and my laptop, which is off to the side there, kind of gives you this side angle 'cause it's sitting on a stand and that's not very flattering. But let's go to our best camera here which is the black magic setting. In this case, I'm taking the HTML output from the Sony camera and it's shooting through a pro quality lens, in this case, a nice zoom lens from Cameron that gives me the flexibility to easily adjust. And it's great because it's a 2.8 lens which gives me the flexibility to let in a lot of light, we're going to have shallow depth of field if I wanted the background behind me to be blurred. Now, in this case it's a simple studio setup with a gentle light back there so there is no depth of field needed but if we were shooting in a practical environment, that shallow depth of field can be really useful. What's also nice unlike a webcam is it's not trying to Auto-focus and I have greater control over the video quality and signal. All right, we're sending that signal in. It looks good. Now I see everything here on the computer screen. It's really important that I check the HD box. If I don't check this box, I'm sending much lower quality video and it's not going to be as good. You can even see it there and it definitely dropped in quality. All right, everything looks good there. So what I now need to do is copy the link. I'll go to the Participants tab here and click Invite and I can copy the link or invitation. I can also invite people via email if I needed to. Once people receive the invite, they'll appear in your Waiting Room. And that's what I have here. Both of our guests have now arrived. So I'm going to click the Admit all button to add them in. (bell chimes) Hi guys. Thanks for making time today. I can't hear you Vanelli. - Can you hear me? - Yeah, I can hear you. - Yeah, of course-- - there we go. It wouldn't be a Zoom call if we couldn't hear somebody's mic. So make sure you use the Participants tab and that you see that their mics and cameras are on. So guys, thanks for participating today. We're just recording a class about podcasting. So we're going to talk to each of you a little bit here. Angela, if it is possible, could you tilt your camera down just a smidge? You have a little bit more headroom than Venelli. Perfect. So what we've done there is we've just tried to get more similar composition between the folks. Obviously there's different framing here. Both Angela and Venelli are regular Web Casters and they produce series about software and they help folks with photo editing. We're going to continue our conversation with them here in just a moment. All right, I see that everything's here. We're able to see and hear each person, everything looks good. So what I'm going to do in just a moment is start recording. But what's important to do is make sure you inform people that you're recording. I also didn't start recording before i had them both on the call. Angela, Venelli, do you mind if I record this interview? Perfect. All right. So what we'll do now is click the Record button and you see the choice here, Record on this computer or record to the Cloud. Recording on the computer is a nice option but it's the recording to the cloud that we want to separate everything out. But here's the thing, your guests can also record. So I'm going to ask them both to click the record on this computer button before I start the Cloud recording. It has to be started first. Would you guys mind starting a local record? - I can do that. And it says, 'Please ask the host to give you permission to record'. - Perfect. So what we need to do here is make sure that they have that ability. Now, it may or may not be available depending upon where you look. So what we need to do is mouse over their names here and give them permission to record local files. There we go. That's going to give them the ability to record. Great. Angela was fast on the trigger. Venelli, if you could also record for safety. It says you're not recording yet. - Nope, I clicked this out. There we go. - Perfect. Now I can start the cloud recording. All right. You'll notice the differences with the icons here. We have two local records. The Local records are going to be the switched feed and the Remote record is going to have a little bit more control over what's happening. Now, it's still important to make sure that we click between the different sources to control who's currently being spotlight. So right now I've clicked on Venelli's thumbnail. If I click on Angela's thumbnail here and I say, "Spotlight", it will switch to Angela being spotlighted. You can also do this here from the More list. So we could remove the spotlight and then spotlight. And this controls whose video is going to be recorded. If you're not spotlighting, then it's going to automatically switch. So right now we're on Venelli. Angela, can you talk for a moment? - I'm here, testing, testing. - Great. You see that it switched over to her. So this gives some control over what's happening. However for the ultimate control and so that it doesn't keep bouncing automatically, be sure to use that Spotlight feature and you can access that right there.