Turning a webinar or a conference talk into clips

A conference talk or a webinar is forty minutes of prepared material by someone who thought carefully about what to say. That is an unusually high concentration of good moments compared with a conversation, and almost nobody clips them.

Why talks are different from interviews

An interview produces good moments by accident — a guest says something better than they meant to. A talk produces them on purpose, because the speaker wrote them. The useful consequence is that the best passages in a talk are usually near the structural joints: the opening claim, the turn in the middle, the summary at the end.

The awkward consequence is that talks build. A point in minute thirty often depends on a definition from minute four, which makes it a bad clip however good it sounded in the room.

The slide problem

If the recording is a screen capture of slides with a small speaker window, a vertical crop has nothing useful to crop to. You have three options, in order of how well they usually work:

• Clip only the passages where the speaker is talking rather than reading the slide, and crop to the speaker.
• Post it square or in its original 16:9 rather than forcing vertical.
• Leave that passage alone. A clip of a slide being read out is not a clip.

Watch for the Q and A

The question and answer section at the end of a talk is frequently the best clipping material in the whole recording, and it is the part most often cut off before the file is saved. It is unscripted, it is specific, and questions make natural clip openings. If you record talks, record past the end of the talk.

Audience laughter and applause

Both are useful boundary markers — something happened just before them. Both are also terrible clip endings, because a clip that ends on applause ends on the room rather than on the idea. Cut after the line that earned the reaction, not after the reaction.

The archive is the opportunity

Most organisations have years of recorded webinars sitting in a folder, already paid for, already cleared for use. Going through that archive is the cheapest content you will ever produce, and unlike a new recording it needs no scheduling, no guest and no camera.

It is also a good test of a clipping tool. Point it at a talk you know well and see whether it finds the passage you would have picked yourself.