Breeze Article
Best Practices for Recording Breeze Meetings
Table of Contents
How Do Meeting Recordings Work?
Understanding how meeting recordings work lays the foundation for how to create a great recording and will spark ideas about the best ways to use the functionality to make your recordings more interactive. Unlike similar products, Breeze Meeting recordings are not monolithic, linear representations of the presenter’s screen over the course of a meeting, but rather interactive, fully indexed, and searchable representations of the live experience. Rather than simply recording what is happening on the presenter’s screen, the Breeze server records the activities of each pod as an individual stream. A master timeline keeps track of each activity and creates an index point (think bookmark) that the meeting recording uses during playback. Using this information can increase the interactivity of your meeting recording as well as help keep the various streams of the recording in sync. We’ll discuss this in more detail later. The Breeze server automatically creates an index point in the meeting recording when any of the following actions occur:
- A piece of content is loaded into the Share Pod (a document, a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation, a video, a Macromedia Captivate demonstration, and so on).
- A user begins sharing their screen.
- A user begins broadcasting audio or live video from the Camera and Voice Pod
- A slide is advanced in a presentation.
- A chat message is sent.
- A meeting layout is changed.
These indices surface in the meeting recording interface. A list of them appears next to a search box that users can use to search for specific bookmarks in the recording. These search results include any chat messages or slide titles.
Figure 1. Breeze Meeting Recordings are played back using the Flash Player which is already installed on 98% of Internet Connected PCs Worldwide meaning viewers can access them instantly without downloading any additional plug-ins.
Since Breeze does not have to process and convert the meeting into a static video, the archive is available within minutes of stopping the recording. However, you should be aware that if you use Breeze with integrated teleconferencing, the recording may not be available at the conclusion of the meeting and may take some time to convert the recorded audio into the MP3 format. This is because the conference provider must process the audio, package it up, and send it to Breeze for integration with the rest of the meeting recording.
The Advantages of Our Approach
Now that you understand how Breeze Meeting recordings work, it’s time to understand how these differences provide a superior viewing experience for your users. If you use meeting recordings as part of marketing, sales, or training initiatives, then you know that it is important to keep viewers engaged to ensure that your message gets across. Similarly, you want users to be able to find what they are looking for without having to sit through the entire recording. As mentioned previously, Breeze Meeting recordings are fully interactive, indexed, and searchable, which means that a learner can go directly to a specific point in a recorded virtual classroom session, or a prospective client can go directly to a point in the webcast on a specific new feature, instead of having to watch an entire recording. Similarly, you can imagine a scenario in which you give participants a clickable URL in a chat window, a FlashPaper document, or embed in a recorded PowerPoint slide. When viewing a recording, participants can click and open that URL as if they were actually in the meeting.
